FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Alberto Lammers; alammers@luskin.ucla.edu
UCLA Voting Rights Project Issues Major Data Report Pointing To Racial Gerrymandering in Tarrant County, Texas
Fort Worth, Tex. (June 4, 2025) — Tarrant County, where the majority of residents are Black and Latino, has adopted a redistricting map that all but guarantees white voters will control three out of four commission seats. Despite being 59% nonwhite, the county’s new map gives communities of color a fair shot at representation in only one district—a move formally challenged today by filing a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Passed on a 3–2 vote on June 3, 2025, by the Commissioners Court, the new map was drawn mid-decade with no legal mandate, and no indication of population shifts requiring redistricting, and drawn on the basis of race. The court instead hired the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF)—a group with a record of advocating for voter restrictions—to develop seven proposed maps, all of which concentrated Latino and Black voters into a single district while fracturing their influence across the others.
In addition to removing a performing minority district, the June 2025 adopted map is a clear example of vote denial to more than 96,000 Black and Latino adults in Tarrant County who will not be allowed to vote for County Commissioner in 2026. By federal law, residents are entitled to vote every four years for their representative. However, the new plan plays games by shifting 96,000 Blacks and Latinos from a district holding elections in 2026 into a district holding their next election in 2028, forcing them to go two additional years without an opportunity to vote. Although shifting populations is sometimes unavoidable when a map has too many people in one or more districts, that was not the case with this plan.
On June 2nd, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court received a new analysis by Michael Rios, senior data scientist at VRP, and was able to review his report before their vote. According to Mr. Rios’ statistical analysis, the Tarrant redistricting effort is unnecessary and deliberately discriminatory against Black and Latino voters. His key findings include:
- No legal or demographic justification exists for redrawing the map in 2025. The 2021 map remains valid and compliant with all federal and state redistricting standards.
- The 2021 enacted map fairly reflects the county’s racial and political diversity, with two of the four commission districts regularly electing candidates preferred by Black and Latino voters.
- The newly adopted map, PILF-7 eliminates one of those two minority-opportunity districts, ensuring that voters of color can influence outcomes in only one district, despite being the majority population.
- Each proposed map relies on racial gerrymandering tactics—packing voters of color into a single district and cracking surrounding communities to preserve white voter control elsewhere.
By contrast, the PILF-7 adopted map:
- Packs voters of color into a single district (District 1) while cracking communities of interest to spread remaining nonwhite voters thin across white-majority districts.
- Eliminates one of the two minority-performing districts, erasing any realistic pathway to representation.
- Undermines racially cohesive voting communities—a key legal standard under the Voting Rights Act—by ensuring white voters dominate three out of four commissioner precincts.
- The new PILF-7 map does not match the political diversity of Tarrant County. Tarrant County is closely divided near 50/50 on partisan lines. Mr. Trump won just 51.8% of the vote in 2024 and for the U.S. Senate the Democrat, Mr. Allred won Tarrant County. There is no political justification for 75% of the districts being Republican.
This redistricting also has broader implications for Texas governance and the 2026 midterms. Tarrant County is one of the state’s fastest-growing and most diverse counties, serving as a bellwether for shifting political power.
Following the June 3rd adoption of the map, a complaint was filed in the Northern Texas Federal Court on June 4, 2025, alleging that Tarrant County’s adopted redistricting plan violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. It argues that the new map was enacted with a discriminatory purpose and has a discriminatory effect, denying Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and elect their candidates of choice. The lawsuit seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, including a new map that complies with federal law and preserves at least two minority-opportunity districts.
According to VRP Senior data scientist Michael Rios, “The data speaks for itself. There is no question that the newly adopted map both dilutes and denies voting rights to Black and Hispanic communities in Tarrant County. There is clear evidence of racially polarized voting across nine recent elections, showing clearly that Anglos in Tarrant bloc-vote against Black and Hispanic candidates of choice. The new PILF map creates three out of four districts that perform for Anglos, even though they are only 41% of the Tarrant population.”
Mr. Rios continued: “County-level representation is as important as the U.S. Congress and Tarrant is a very large urban county. The commission map determines not only who sets local budgets and policies, but also who builds political capital, whose voice gets heard in policy debates, and how resources are distributed to different communities. Even beyond Tarrant, these lines shape the future of Texas politics.”
About the UCLA Voting Rights Project
The UCLA Voting Rights Project (VRP) is a project of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and Division of Social Sciences, in collaboration with the UCLA School of Law aimed at creating an accessible and equitable system of voting for all Americans through impact litigation, research, and clinical education to expand access to the ballot box. Since 2018 the VRP seeks to address three gaps in the voting rights field: training newly graduated, young lawyers and expert witnesses; developing new legal and social science theories for voting rights cases; and advancing voting rights through national and local public policy and litigation.
The VRP seeks to ensure that all individuals, regardless of race, partisanship, gender or class are afforded equal access to the electoral process and representation in governance. For more information about the Voting Rights Project, please visit vrp.ucla.edu
