After clearing a backlog of more than 70,000 unprocessed voter registration applications mere days before the November election, the Bexar County Elections Department is once again staring down thousands of unprocessed applications.
As of press time, the county’s new registration backlog stands at 4,000, Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert told the Current in a phone interview. The pileup comes as the Feb. 2 deadline to register to vote in the March 3 primary elections fast approaches.
Calvert sounded the alarm in a Friday afternoon Instagram video. In the clip, he blamed the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, alleging officials there are engaging in deliberate voter disenfranchisement to “shave off” participation in the midterms.
Gone are the days of assuming well-meaning incompetence at the state level, Calvert told the Current. Rather, he argues a slowdown in the state’s voter-registration system is working as intended, providing another front in a GOP battle to suppress votes ahead of what many are predicting will be a punishing election for the party currently controlling every branch of the federal government.
“It just reeks of a Project 2025 plan — to make sure that they rig the system so that the will of the voters is not heard,” Calvert said.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office denied the allegation.
“As voter registration deadlines near, it is not unusual for counties to see a spike in registrations to be processed,” the state agency said in an unattributed statement emailed to the Current. The statement explained that Texas is transferring all its voter records to a new statewide database.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson is a political appointee of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a key ally of President Donald Trump. Her office last week confirmed it had turned over the state’s voter rolls, which include data on 18.4 million Texans, to the Trump administration on Dec. 23.
Voting watchdogs have questioned the legality of the Justice Department’s effort to obtain states’ data and warned that the White House could be use the records to drop voters ahead of the upcoming elections.
The current county backlog, much like the one that piled up last fall, is a result of the Secretary of State’s TEAM database, according to Calvert. The county hastily joined TEAM last year as a stop-gap solution while it waits for commissioners’ final approval of new voter registration processing software, VR Systems.
Both Calvert and Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew have told the Current that the TEAM database, primarily used to service less-populous Texas counties, isn’t equipped to handle one with as many residents as Bexar.
As such, the input times for new applications have slowed due to insufficient memory the TEAM server, county officials maintain.
While Bexar County Elections Department workers were previously able to process up to 24 voter registration applications hourly, that’s now down to eight due to lags in the system, according to Calvert. What’s more, he added, elections department workers find that certain screens in the system aren’t even appearing for them.
“This is a big issue as we head into our primary election,” Calvert said in the video.
Working ‘hand-in-hand’ with with the state
When the Current asked County Judge Peter Sakai last fall about voter fears that the county’s then-backlog was part of a widespread suppression effort, Sakai pushed back. He said county elections staff and the Secretary of State worked “hand-in-hand” to get Bexar County integrated with the statewide system.
At the time, Carew echoed Sakai’s messaging, saying there didn’t seem to be any nefarious motives behind the slowdown at the state level.
However, Calvert said he’s seeing no sign of goodwill as the primaries approach. Support at the state level to deal with the current service problems is virtually nonexistent, he told the Current.
“The state gives the county zero — I said ‘zero’ — service commitments,” he said. “Right now, our staff in the elections department says they’re not hearing from them at all.”
In its statement to the Current, the Office of the Texas Secretary of State said the sheer size of the data migration of all Texas records to a new system — called TEAM 2.0 — is to blame.
“Our office is working closely with our partners at the county level to address any issues as they arise during the ongoing rollout of TEAM 2.0,” the statement said.
“This is a massive undertaking involving the migration of over 18 million voter files — a process that became more complicated with VOTEC suddenly closed its business, leaving Bexar County and several others without a functioning voter registration,” the Secretary of State’s Office continued. “We took extraordinary measures to onboard Bexar County — a process that usually takes months — in a matter of weeks. And we will continue to provide support as we prepare for the primary.”
The Current reached out to the Bexar County Elections Department and Sakai for comment on the present backlog but got no response by press time.
However, about an hour after the Current’s inquiry, the Elections Department and County Judge Peter Sakai shared the same statement on their respective Facebook pages, notifying the public of the slowdown and confirming the lag is due to the Secretary of State’s TEAM software. The post didn’t mention the backlog, however.
Bexar County Elections also limited the ability of Facebook users to comment on the post.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
Calvert told the Current that the lack of support from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office is “putting strain on staff.”
“Some staff quit because of having to put in overtime to get all of these registrations done several months ago,” he added.
Indeed, the Current reported on turnover at the Elections Department last fall due to what some inside the office characterized as a dip in morale. They attributed the decline, in part, to employees working longer hours and spending less time with their families to work through the backlog.
Bexar County Elections Department staff were forced to work through at least one weekend before the office hired on dozens of temporary staffers to report in shifts and clear the tens of thousands of unprocessed voter registration applications.
Calvert told the Current that days before the election, a county consultant discovered that 11,000 San Antonio streets were still absent from the system — something the Secretary of State’s Office missed entirely.
Though county staff caught the massive error, they seemingly didn’t correct it entirely. Some residents still showed up at the polls to discover there was no record of their voter registration, according to Calvert.
“I myself was a victim of voter suppression with the TEAM system in the last election,” the commissioner said in the video. “I went to go vote, and I wasn’t in the system.”
Deliberate disenfranchisement
So, at what point should voters stop seeing this as a glitchy state system and and view it as deliberate disenfranchisement?
“I think at the point that [the Texas Secretary of State] sent the [Trump Department of Justice] all 18 million voter registration records last Friday,” Calvert said.
Texas Secretary of State Nelson and the DOJ have yet to specify how that data will be used, and the Democratic National Committee last week sent a letter warning Nelson her actions may violate federal voting laws and put the state at risk of legal action.
Every vote counts, especially in tight races like those shaping up in the March primaries for U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s seat. Those votes will become even more crucial in the much-anticipated November midterms, which might cost Republicans the U.S. House.
Last fall, those 11,000 missing Bexar County voters could have made all the difference in a consequential election. Funding for the Spurs new downtown arena passed 52% to 48%, a margin of fewer than 11,000 votes.
Striking out on our own
Calvert urged Bexar County Commissioners Court to approve the final contract for VR Systems so the county can begin implementation and leave the state’s TEAM system behind.
“It’s been delayed in the District Attorney’s Office, and that’s unfortunate,” he said.
Calvert added that Commissioners Court on Sept. 2 asked for the DA to look at similarly sized counties, such as Tarrant, or even those in other states, for a sample contract Bexar could use to model its pact with VR Systems. At the beginning of negotiations, VR Systems also provided its own standard contract.
While the DA’s Office has gone through several versions of the vendor’s contract, Calvert said Larry Roberson, chief of the office’s Civil Division, has slowed the project by voicing doubts about how much the project would cost the county.
“That isn’t the role of the district attorney’s office,” Calvert said. “We voted to get this done.”
VR Systems is likely to cost Bexar County around $1 million, which officials already made room for in the budget for a previous voting vendor called Votech. That company went out of business in August after numerous bailouts from the county.
After Votech folded, county commissioners voted 4-1 in September to direct staff to negotiate a contract with VR Systems as a replacement. Once Roberson finalizes the negotiated contract, he’s required to bring it back to the court for final approval.
Moments before this story was published, Calvert texted the Current with an update, saying the Commissioners Court now plans to discuss the VR Systems contract at its Jan. 20 meeting.
Regardless, VR Systems won’t be ready by the March 3 primaries, Calvert said. However, he remains confident county staff will be able to process the backlog in time, even with the challenge of slow inputs. Calvert added that the county is prepared to once again hire additional temp workers to process the backlog in time for the election. He didn’t specify how many, however.
It remains to be seen whether VR Systems will be up and running before the November midterms, Calvert added. Or whether further problems will arise.
“When it comes to things that enfranchise people, there just seems to be a very troubling pattern,” he said.
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