An Interview with Kevin Burge for Congress TX-24

So we just found out today that there's a new lawsuit that's been filed against the Tarrant County for, um, suing over the elimination of 92 polling locations, but you have some experience in this- Mm-hmm ... having done this previously.

Can you share a little bit about that with us? Certainly.

So the background of this is that the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court had proposed shutting down 50% of the polling locations in Tarrant County for this midterm election.

Um, I believed that this would cause undue harm to the voters of Tarrant County, and not just Democratic voters.

I'm talking [laughs] voters, Americans- Yeah ... trying to exercise their right, uh, their constitutional rights.

So we pushed back on that, and we joined with, uh, Nathan Smith, uh, as well as the Tarrant County Young Dems, um, and we drafted, uh, some demands, sent them over to the county, and sh- should they have not meet those demands, we would have taken them to court.

Um, some of the demands were met.

Um, they did somewhat kind of provide their methodology for, uh, what, why they were gonna close so many polling locations.

Uh, I, I still think it was not good methodology, and it was based off of, uh, cost [laughs] as opposed- Hmm ... to, you know, having people practice their rights.

Uh, that's not acceptable to me.

Um, we also asked that they ha- brought back some of their, uh, polling locations on college campuses.

Um, unfortunately they did not do that, but we...

There is one that's close to UTA, I believe now.

It's still a hike, and it's not, uh, acceptable.

Uh, and then after we went to the Commissioner's Court, a lot of other people went to the Commissioner's Court, as you're well aware, um, to push back against the 50% closures.

Um, they did reevaluate, and they came back with a plan to go to 30% closures.

Again, that's not adequate in my book.

Um, we should have, as a growing county, more polling locations no matter the cost, because we're talking about the rights of American citizens, making things easier for Americans to practice their rights.

But they did, uh, give us a little bit more in there.

Uh, so we kinda did a cost analysis and time analysis based on, you know, what they, what they did, um, what other voting rights activists and groups like the NAACP and, um, the ACLU had kind of talked about as well, and we decided not to go forth with, uh, that lawsuit.

Um, it's good to hear, though, that it is going forward with another group of people, because it does, uh, directly impact Black and Brown residents within Fort Worth more than it did, you know, my district- Mm-hmm ... which is very targeted and very telling about what the priorities of this county is.

Yeah.

I think that the lawsuit specifically talks about a quote from O'Hare in 2022 where he said that if you're not a Republican office holder and you ha- if you're a Republican office holder and you have not been called racist, you probably haven't been doing a thing.

Mm-hmm.

And as evidence of discrimination, they pointed out that their own rules was to not cut precincts with more than 50- 500 voters, and listing the voting sites with more than 500 voters that were cut, and they pointed out that they never issued...