Denton County Is the Only DFW County Where You Must Vote at Your Assigned Precinct on Election Day

Here's what most Flower Mound residents don't realize until they're standing at the wrong door: during early voting, you can cast your ballot at any location in the county. On Election Day itself, you must vote at the one polling place assigned to your precinct — and only that one.

That makes Denton County an outlier. Every other county in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has moved to countywide polling on Election Day — Tarrant, Collin, Dallas, Rockwall, Ellis, Kaufman, Parker, Somervell, and Hood among them — which means voters there can walk into any polling location in their county and cast a ballot. Denton County still sends you to one assigned precinct and no other.

A nonpartisan group called Voting Centers Now! has been pressing the county to change that. Dozens of its members gathered at a recent Commissioners Court meeting to make the case in person, and they plan to keep coming. Jane Scholz, an election worker and active advocate with the group, said supporters will continue showing up at upcoming Commissioners Court meetings, with a different speaker at the podium each time.

"Eighty-seven percent of the voters in the state of Texas live in counties where you can vote anywhere on election day," Scholz said. "So, we're just saying, give us the same rights and privileges as 87% of the voters in the state of Texas."

The problem has a concrete shape. Election judge Rosemary Calderon, who has worked elections for 20 years, told commissioners what it looks like from the front lines: voters arriving at the wrong polling location, needing to be redirected. Some of those voters live physically closer to a site that isn't in their precinct and head there by mistake. Scholz says she personally turned away more than 300 voters who showed up at the wrong location during the March 2024 Democratic primary.

Why hasn't it changed? The parties are part of the answer. In February 2024, County Judge Andy Eads said both the county Democratic and Republican parties needed to consent to countywide voting centers before the court would move forward. Local Democrats have generally supported voting centers; Republicans have not. Denton County GOP Chair Melinda Preston told a Commissioners Court meeting that the party opposed voting centers because of concerns over voter privacy and long voting lines. Denton County Democratic Party chair Delia Parker-Mims has argued that voter fraud and privacy risk are no more likely under countywide Election Day voting than during early voting, when countywide access already exists.

There's also a technical backstory worth knowing. Denton County was barred from participating in countywide polling until 2021 because state election code didn't allow counties using paper ballots to use vote centers. Denton County has used paper ballots since 2017. In November 2021, state law expanded countywide polling to include hand-marked paper ballot counties. The legal barrier is gone.

Countywide voting has been a running debate in Denton County for a few years. When the May 26 primary runoffs came around, Denton County sat out — and by population, it was the biggest county in the state to pass on countywide voting for that election.

The November 3 general election is the next one on the county calendar. Before then, look up your precinct. The Denton County Elections website at votedenton.gov has a voter lookup tool that shows your specific Election Day polling location. Worth checking now, not on Election morning.