An effort to stop Tarrant County’s new commissioner precincts was shot down Thursday.
Multiple groups suing the county over the maps asked Judge Megan Fahey to enact an injunction against the county’s new maps, claiming that the map is not legally valid because it focuses on population and partisanship without consideration for other state constitutional requirements for redistricting.
It was part of a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County and the League of United Latin American Citizens Fort Worth Council 4568.
The lawsuit alleges the county’s mid-decade redistricting is unconstitutional, naming Tarrant County, the commissioners court and County Judge Tim O’Hare as defendants.
Karla Maradiaga, a staff voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said she believes the evidence presented was sufficient to achieve a temporary injunction.
“We believe that the evidence provided by our witnesses and our experts were sufficient to show that we would likely get relief on the merits and that the motion should have been granted,” Maradiaga said.
Still, plaintiffs in the lawsuit weren’t surprised, she said.
“Unfortunately, they were not surprised by the outcome,” she told KERA News. “I think they live on a daily basis with these policies and just how opaque they are.”
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Maradiaga said the denial means attorneys suing the county will need to take “a two pronged approach moving forward.”
“We need to do more work at kind of explaining that law and why it doesn’t apply as the county has framed it,” Maradiaga said. “Then also continuing to provide more evidence, to seek more evidence, particularly from the county … to put before the judge about why we are right on the law and on the facts.”
See here for the previous update. With the failure of the federal lawsuit as well, this means that the new map, which was designed to draw one of the two Democratic commissioners out of their seat, will be in effect for 2026. At least, that’s what I think it means. I’m not sure what to make of that last comment above. Might there be another lawsuit, with different plaintiffs and/or a different argument? Maybe, I guess, but we’re now about a month out from the start of filing season for the primaries, and I don’t think that would be enough time for a new suit to get heard, even if everything moved at maximum speed. I could be wrong, but my money at this point is on the new map being used. That’s a bad outcome and I wish it weren’t true, but it’s where we are.
So Tarrent is copying Harris County, is Lina somehow involved, cofused or both? How does this benifit Leslie?