A Voter Walked 2.5 Miles, Turned Away, Now the NAACP Wants To Investigate

Veronica Anderson walked two-and-a-half miles to the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center on March 3 because she wanted to vote. Election workers told her she was at the wrong polling place — a precinct she had never heard of. "I walked up here because I want to vote so, so bad," she told a reporter from the Dallas Free Press, adding that it felt like "your self-esteem and everything is torn down."

Anderson's confusion, multiplied across hundreds of Dallas County voters that Tuesday, has now drawn a formal NAACP investigation and left 1,756 Democratic ballots permanently uncounted. The chaos stemmed from the Dallas County Republican Party's decision to abandon countywide vote centers, which had operated without issue since 2019. The GOP went in favor of precinct-based polling places rooted in unfounded concerns about ballot-counting machines. The move forced Democrats into the same system. Precinct maps were not finalized until February 18, and the state's votetexas.gov website was never updated with the correct locations. "Around one-third of the voters are having problems," Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Terri Burke said on Election Day.

A local judge extended polling hours to 9 p.m., but Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened. The Texas Supreme Court ordered any ballots cast after 7 p.m. to be separated, signaling that they might be disallowed. Last Thursday, Dallas County Democrats withdrew their lawsuit to count those votes, declaring the state Supreme Court "no longer a viable forum for seeking a fair and independent application of the law." The NAACP called the episode "a blueprint for voter suppression being tested in real time."