'Shame!': Man dragged from hearing as Texas judge clears room during anti-GOP remarks

Texas voters expressed outrage on Tuesday over a plan to reduce polling stations by almost half — and one Texas judge promptly ended the meeting as those voters tried to make their voices heard.

“In TX: Tarrant County Judge Tim O'Hare just cleared the meeting room, kicking out public speakers who are opposed to the GOP plan to cut half of the battleground county's Election Day voting locations for November,” reported Jen Rice from Democracy Docket on X on Tuesday. She added in a separate post, “They're probably hoping you won't hear about this. But tomorrow in TX, Tarrant County officials meet to vote on a GOP plan to cut almost HALF of Election Day voting locations, plus 8 early voting locations, some of them on campuses. Not hard to guess why.”

In Rice’s post, a video shows an African American voter telling Judge O’Hare that “people are removed for speaking out. People are treated like a disruption instead of the reason this government exists.”

The woman added, “You keep telling us not to ‘Californiaize’ my Texas, while in reality, you keep ‘Russia-izing’ my Texas. You three boys from the TRP.”

At that point Judge O’Hare cut off the voter and said, “All right, hang on. That's it. We're going to clear the entire chamber now. You'll get your 10 seconds left — I told you how it was going to go, so we are in recess until the chamber is cleared.”

He then referred to one of the voters as “that one” and ordered him removed, while the crowd began chanting “Shame!” repeatedly.

According to another video, posted by Austin's KXAN-TV's Tahera Rahman, a voter was physically removed from the room for picking up the microphone from the podium.

"Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare ordered a man to be arrested for disrupting a public meeting, according to a county commissioner," Rahman posted. "The man was speaking against a proposal to cut polling locations and picked up the podium microphone as he spoke, which O’Hare said he couldn’t do."

According to Fort Worth Report's Cecilia Lenzen, the Tarrant County Republicans have worked to reduce the number of places where voters can cast ballots in 2026.

“Tarrant County voters could have fewer places to cast a ballot in this November’s midterm election than they did four years ago,” Lenzen wrote. “County commissioners are considering cutting the number of Election Day sites to 176, a roughly 45 [percent] decrease from the 316 day-of voting sites available in the 2022 midterms. For early voting, there would be 42 polling sites instead of the 50 available in 2022.”