Voter Suppression Hasn't Ended, It's Evolved

Chaos is part of the plan

Last week, Texas held its statewide primary elections for the governorship and Congress. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a civil rights attorney and one of the sharpest critics of the Trump administration in Congress, lost the Democratic US Senate primary race to state Representative James Talarico. By the numbers, it wasn’t particularly close: Talarico took 53.1% of the vote to Crockett’s 45.6%. One might consider this a clean loss and something to move on from easily.

Except it wasn’t that simple.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett

On election day, videos began circulating on social media showing voters being turned away from polling locations, redirected miles across their counties, and told the rules had changed. Crockett refused to concede until the next morning. “I can tell you, people were disenfranchised,” she told supporters at her watch party. She had been receiving calls and emails all day from voters who couldn’t cast their ballots.

The rule change nobody asked for

Weeks before the primary, GOP officials in both Dallas and Williamson counties had withdrawn from the cooperative arrangements that made countywide voting possible; arrangements that had been in place for years. For context, countywide voting is a system where any eligible voter in a county can cast their ballot at any designated polling place in that county, instead of being limited to one assigned precinct location. Texas law makes countywide voting contingent on agreement from both parties, which effectively means either side holds a veto. With a unilateral Republican decision, voters who had spent years casting ballots anywhere in their county were now locked to a single assigned precinct.

Republicans suggested that the shift away from county-wide voting was meant to protect the integrity of the elections and prevent people from double-voting. However, there’s no evidence that countywide voting led to people casting multiple ballots, especially since election officials have adopted procedures and voting equipment technology that carefully tracks who has voted and where, in real time.

Even so, precinct boundaries hadn’t even been settled until December, giving election officials and voters barely a few months to absorb a fundamental change to how they’d cast their ballots. This is because, in Texas, when the Legislature and courts finish adjusting congressional and legislative maps, counties are required to “re‑precinct” so that each voting precinct sits cleanly inside the new districts and stays under population caps. This pushed many counties (including large urban ones) into adopting new precinct maps as late as December 2025 for use in the March 2026 primaries.

The results were predictable. According to AP News, a Dallas County judge ordered polls to stay open two hours past the 7 p.m. close after citing “voter confusion so severe” that it caused the website of the county election office to crash. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — who was also a candidate in the Republican Senate primary the same day — refused and appealed the decision, which the state Supreme Court stayed. Voters who arrived at polling places were allowed to cast provisional ballots, but it’s unclear if they’ll be counted.

To imagine the scale of people impacted, Dallas County alone had almost 90,000 Democratic voters voting in-person on Election Day. Election poll monitor Denisse Molina, working with the Texas Civil Rights Project in Williamson County, reported one voting site with only three machines serving voters from 13 precincts. About 200 people waited for hours, and many left without voting. “I had never experienced voter suppression like that,” Molina told the Guardian.

Amber Mills of Move Texas noted that young people, working-class voters, and people of color are disproportionately likely to vote on election day rather than during early voting. Ending countywide voting hits these groups hardest because it turns a relatively flexible, one-stop system into a minefield of logistical hurdles that fall heaviest on people with the least time, transit, and understanding of voting regulations. Dallas County, where Crockett had done the deepest organizing among Black voters, was ground zero for the disruption. So was Williamson County, where Talarico had drawn support from Latino and white voters. Mills called it “very telling” that those two specific counties were the ones targeted.

The Texas Democratic Party’s chair, Kendall Scudder, put it plainly: “This didn’t happen overnight. This has been legal policy that Republicans have been pushing for years.” To be clear, Scudder is pointing to years of Republican legal maneuvering aimed at making elections so convoluted that they routinely break down at the expense of Democratic-leaning voters.

Texas has done this before — many times

Here is what the coverage this past week largely left out: Texas has been stress-testing methods to keep Black and Brown voters away from the ballot box for over 150 years. What happened in Dallas and Williamson counties last week fits a consistent pattern in the state’s history.

From the moment enslaved people were freed in 1865, white supremacist mobs, Democratic Party bosses, and local law‑enforcement in Texas used beatings, lynchings, and organized terror — rarely punished, and often tolerated by state authorities — to keep Black citizens away from the ballot. As federal Reconstruction policies, the Fifteenth Amendment, and sporadic enforcement made naked terror harder to defend in court and on the national stage, Texas lawmakers shifted to more “respectable” tools like poll taxes and whites‑only primaries as well as other facially neutral rules that achieved the same goal of Black disenfranchisement.

In 1902, the state embedded a poll tax directly into its constitution: a fee charged to every would‑be voter, but deliberately set at roughly a day’s wages for many Black and Mexican laborers, pricing them out of the electorate while allowing officials to insist the law was “race‑neutral.” When Black voters in Waco successfully challenged their local “white primary” (a Democratic Party primary in which only white voters were allowed to participate) in 1918, the legislature responded by rewriting state law in 1922 to let the party explicitly limit its primaries to white voters statewide, slamming the door shut again on Black political power. Since the Democratic Party dominated Texas politics, winning the primary was winning the election. Being locked out of the primary meant being locked out of power entirely.

What followed was a decades-long legal chess match. As documented by the Texas State Historical Association, Black Texans and the NAACP fought back through the courts in a series of landmark cases: Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, Nixon v. Condon in 1932, and finally Smith v. Allwright in 1944.

Nixon v. Herndon and Nixon v. Condon were both federal Supreme Court cases backed by the NAACP, in which a Black El Paso doctor, L.A. Nixon, repeatedly argued that Texas could not use either a blunt statute or a delegated party rule to bar Black Democrats from the only election that mattered. He won both times, but each ruling left Texas a new loophole to rebuild the white primary until Smith v. Allwright finally slammed that door in 1944. The Supreme Court ruled eight to one that Texas primaries were so intertwined with the general electoral process that racial exclusion was unconstitutional. By 1947, the number of registered Black voters in Texas climbed to 100,000, up from just 30,000 in 1940.

Smith v. Allwright opened the primary ballot, but Texas didn’t simply stop trying to fence people out. For the next two decades, county bosses and state leaders leaned even harder on the poll tax and local Jim Crow intimidation to keep Black and Mexican American turnout low until federal courts finally killed the poll tax in 1966. And still, Texas changed the rules again.

In 1966, the legislature’s next move was a registration scheme designed to run voters out of the process on a technicality. The annual re-enrollment policy required voters to re‑register in person or by mail within a tight four‑month window that closed more than half a year before Election Day. It took until 1971 for the courts to kill it.

In every redistricting cycle since 1970, federal courts have found Texas in violation of the US Constitution or the Voting Rights Act. Every single one. In 2011, the state passed a voter ID law so restrictive that it accepted fewer forms of identification than any comparable law in the country. Texas’s ID law hits minority voters harder because it deems the ID types that Black and Latino Texans are most likely to have as unacceptable, while requiring IDs that are costlier and harder for them to obtain. In 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, removing federal oversight requirements for states with histories of discriminatory voting laws, the floodgates opened yet again.

Ostensibly, the conservative justices in Shelby County were not defending Jim Crow in 2013; Roberts framed preclearance as an outdated remedy for a problem he claimed had largely been solved. But whatever the intent of the Court, state officials treated that opening as an invitation. In Texas, Republicans moved within hours to revive voting rules that disproportionately burden Black, Latino, and poor voters. That meant flipping the switch on a strict photo‑ID law that courts had previously blocked, one that an estimated hundreds of thousands of Texans, disproportionately Black and Latino, lacked the documents to satisfy.

It also cleared the way for Republican officials to lock in gerrymandered maps and close or move polling places in Black and Latino communities. Often, these changes were pushed under a partisan banner of “election integrity,” even when courts later found those laws had a discriminatory racial intent and impact.

Twenty-five other states also created new obstacles to voting after that ruling, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Still, Texas was among the most aggressive.

The blueprint

NAACP president Derrick Johnson didn’t mince words in his statement following the chaos in last week’s primary. “What happened in Texas is a warning to the entire nation… This is not just a Texas problem. It is a blueprint for voter suppression being tested in real time.”

While the old tools (the grandfather clause, the poll tax, the white primary, even more contemporary ID rules) targeted individual voters —making each person clear some extra hurdle to get a ballot — what happened in Dallas and Williamson is more like sabotaging the machinery itself, changing precinct lines and rules so abruptly that confusion, bad information, and long lines knock people out en masse, no matter how carefully they’ve tried to follow the rules. The details may change, but the goal stays the same. Conservatives in power aim to make voting inconvenient enough, confusing enough, and exhausting enough that people eventually just don’t do it.

Johnson’s warning is a reminder that this kind of engineered confusion only works if people get used to it — if we start treating vanishing polling places and last‑minute rule changes as just the price of participating in American democracy rather than as choices made by people in power. “We cannot let this become the new normal,” he says. “Your vote is your voice, and if it did not hold power, they would not be trying so hard to take it away.”