After a half-year delay and the scrapping of a January contract that was a nonstarter, Bexar County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved a final pact for a new voter-registration system from third-party vendor VR Systems.
The new elections-management system will enable Bexar County to abandon the Texas Secretary of State’s flawed TEAM 2.0 system, which has caused backlogs and delays at the county level ahead of both the fall and spring elections.
“The fight to get VR Systems is emblematic of the shenanigans to suppress the vote that are happening in Texas,” Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert told the Current of the approval. “And it never should have taken as long as it did to get where we got.”
Bexar County officials first began considering the switch over to the third-party vendor in the summer, before the prior vendor Votec went out of business in August. Bexar was one of several Texas counties that previously relied on Votec and were forced to make a sudden switch to the state’s free voter-registration system.
However, Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew warned county commissioners at the time that TEAM wasn’t equipped to handle a county of our size. That’s why VR Systems has emerged as the vendor of choice for several other populous Texas counties, including Tarrant, Denton, Collin and El Paso.
The sudden need to upload Bexar County’s 2 million voter registration records to TEAM in August and September caused a backlog of 70,000 voter registrations to pile up ahead of the rapidly approaching fall election.
After Votec went under, county commissioners voted during the body’s meeting last September to draft a contract with VR Systems. However, a process the vendor said normally takes 30 to 60 days ended up taking 6 months.
What’s more, the proposed deal produced in January was markedly different than the standard contract initially presented by the vendor. The differences were profound enough that VR Systems legal team would not approve the deal, company Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin told the Current at the time. This caused the January meeting to adjourn with no action taken, and cast doubt whether the commissioners could even approve a replacement pact at the February meeting.
Given how far the original document had allegedly strayed from the proposal presented by the vendor, it marked a sharp change of fortunes when it was approved by the vendor and passed at this Tuesday’s commissioners court.
Calvert says it was likely the press around the issue and mounting public pressure that caused the county to forego its usual approval process and fast-track the final contract.
The Current reached out to VR Systems on the new contract and what had changed to make it acceptable. However, we received no response by press time.
The contract for the voter-registration and elections-management software will cost the county nearly $2 million, an amount that had already been set aside in the budget due to the prior contract with Votec.
Commissioner Grant Moody, the sole Republican on the dias, was also the sole no vote on the contract both in September and at Tuesday’s meeting. Moody, who previously expressed displeasure at the price tag, argued Tuesday that the county shouldn’t rush its normal contracting process, according to the San Antonio Report.
But VR Systems’ Martin told the Current at the January meeting that because the vendor only onboards one county at a time and implementation takes one to two months, time is of the essence. Further delays would have sent Bexar to the back of the line as the company worked with other counties.
Meanwhile, Bexar County Elections officials still have to contend with the state’s TEAM 2.0 system for the March primary and May runoff. Officials said the system already is causing problems as early voting gets underway.
“We have ballot-by-mail applications that have come into our office, we’re about 20,000 in [for the primary], it takes us seven to 10 minutes per application to just get it into their system,” Carew told the San Antonio Report. “Not only that, other counties are reporting that some of the data that they’re inputting into there is getting wiped out.”
Now that the battle for VR Systems has been won, Commissioner Calvert said this is just one battle of many in the fight for voting rights in Texas as the midterm elections approach.
“It’s going to be a constant tug of war to have a fair election,” Calvert said.
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