There’s always some new trick.
In what could signal an alarming new precedent, a Texas county revealed it plans to move some local candidates to new districts under a revised map drafted between the primary and general elections.
If allowed to proceed, it would likely be the first time Texas voting maps are changed between the primary and general elections. That means the candidates some voters will see on their November ballots will be different from those voters selected in the primary just months ago.
Pro-voting plaintiffs are warning the state’s highest court that the maneuver is a dangerous test that, if not stopped, could be repeated elsewhere across the state to undermine the will of the voters.
The plaintiffs, which include candidates for local offices who were moved to new districts, filed an emergency petition Tuesday asking the Texas Supreme Court to block Galveston County from implementing new maps for the November general election. They argue the switch violates voters’ state and federal constitutional equal protection rights by denying them the opportunity to choose their preferred candidates in the primary.
“If this is not stopped, the precedent set will be horribly damaging to democracy,” the plaintiffs argued. “It will make Texas’s primary elections an empty exercise.”
[…]
The Texas Election Code requires that a political party’s nominees for a county general election be selected by a primary election, they argued.
Galveston County’s 11th hour move to change district lines came to light during a federal court hearing last week in the long-running Petteway lawsuit challenging GOP gerrymanders adopted by the county in 2021. U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, struck down the Galveston maps in 2023, ruling that they violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The decision was later reversed by the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit, and some of the claims are still being litigated in the district court.
After the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision this April to gut the VRA, Galveston County voted to adopt a new map with new district lines for justices of the peace, constables and county commissioners.
While multiple Southern states enacted new maps this summer in the aftermath of that ruling, none did so after their primary elections were already held. In Mississippi, Republicans will hold off on redrawing maps until after the November election because the state already conducted its primaries in March, the week after the Texas primaries.
Until last week, it wasn’t clear whether Galveston County officials intended to actually use their newly adopted map in November.
But at a July 28 hearing in federal court, Joe Nixon — an attorney with the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) representing Galveston County — revealed the plan.
“(T)he 2026 map is the legal map that’s now in effect, and the elections in November are being held under the 2026 map lines,” Nixon told the court.
Nixon and PILF, a leading anti-voting law firm based in Washington D.C., oversaw last year’s mid-decade GOP gerrymander in Tarrant County — which outraged Texas voters described as a clear-cut illegal racial gerrymander. A federal court upheld the map.
When asked by Brown, the federal district judge hearing the Petteway case, Nixon could not provide any precedent for this change.
See here, here, and here for some background. What’s weird to me about this is that Galveston County was already allowed to use the map that eliminated the precinct that had previously elected the one Democrat, Stephen Holmes; he was ousted in 2024 under the map that Galveston County Commissioners Court adopted in 2021 for the specific purpose of ousting him. They already have an all-Republican Court. Now to be sure, that map is still being litigated, which is why this hearing happened. It’s at least possible that the plaintiffs could win on some of their remaining claims, if there’s anything left of the Voting Rights Act post-Callais to provide for a win condition. I assume then that the point of this little bit of fuckery was the Galveston commissioners doing it because they believed they could. Like, what law even exists now to stop them, right? I suppose we’ll find out.
(I am assuming that the Joe Nixon in this story is the former Republican State Rep. from Houston that I referred to as Moldy Joe, for good reasons. Once a sleazeball, always a sleazeball.)
I am not aware of any legal precedent to allow change in the lines without holding a new primary or special election. When the federal court in Houston invalidated congressional districts in the 1990s, they required new special elections in all districts which had boundary changes, including several districts for which the boundary changes were minimal, including CD 8 which was mostly in Montgomery County and only moved a handful of precincts, requiring Kevin Brady to face a second primary in the entire new district to hold his seat. Moreover, changed boundaries means different persons live within the jurisdiction and are eligible to run for office and to vote for the officeholders.