With the clock ticking down to the midterm elections, Bexar County Commissioners Court met last week to discuss a contract for a new third-party voter registration system.
But rather than approving a finalized contract, commissioners came to an impasse during executive session, further delaying implementation of a new system called Voter Focus from proposed vendor VR Systems.
That chasm appears as Bexar County seeks to jump from the State of Texas’ TEAM system, which county officials blame for backlogs that caused thousands of voter registrations to pile up ahead of the fall and spring elections. The delay also leaves a narrowing timeline to finalize the contract and implement the new system before the November elections.
Last Tuesday’s court session and the situation leading up to it are highly unusual, one of VR Systems’ top executives told the Current in a sit-down interview.
First, it’s unusual how long the District Attorney’s Office has taken to draft the contract — a process that’s run from September until January — VR Systems Chief Operations Officer Ben Martin said. County commissioners initially approved entering into an agreement with VR Systems at a Sept. 2 meeting.
“Inside 30 to 60 days, we usually have a contract,” Martin added.
Martin said it’s also unusual that he hopped on a last-minute flight from Tallahassee, Florida, to speak out against the contract finally proposed by the DA’s office.
But what’s most unusual is the contract itself, Martin said, arguing that it appeared clear from the beginning of the meeting that the document on the table was a nonstarter. He alleges the paperwork mischaracterizes what VR Systems does and includes alleged penalties to which the company simply won’t agree.
Officials with the Bexar County DA’s Office declined to be interviewed about the process. However, in an emailed response, Larry L. Roberson, chief of the office’s Civil Division, disagreed on all counts.
“Your premise that the contract addresses cloud-based services of the vendor is patently incorrect,” Roberson said in the email.
“The timeline was driven by appropriate due diligence, an intervening election, the Court schedule and required cybersecurity and technical compatibility review, including a Bexar County security assessment completed on January 8, 2026,” he continued.
As it has done with the 14 other Texas counties with which it’s secured contracts, VR Systems supplied a standard contract to Bexar County in July. That contract was approved by the Texas BuyBoard, a cooperative that streamlines the purchasing process for municipalities. Though the contract might get tweaked in what’s called a “red-lining process,” those changes are usually minor, he explained.
“In the end, the contract in all 14 of those counties resembles the baseline contract with some changes that are appropriate for each county,” Martin said.
Instead, the contract the DA’s office worked up and presented last Tuesday had no resemblance to the original document, according to Martin, who said it “seems to be written from the ground up.”
‘Poison Pills’?
In a January 20 email to the Current and other recipients, Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert said the revamped contract contains “poison pills,” or provisions that threaten its finalization.
“The contract has been substantially convoluted by the county, without vendor agreement, and has gotten so far off track it no longer aligns with the product VR Systems is selling to Bexar County,” Calvert said in the email. “As a result, VR Systems has made objections that must be corrected in order to execute the agreement.”
Martin says one of the contract’s provisions would hold the vendor liable for the timeliness of migrating data to and from the State of Texas’ registration system, called TEAM — something Martin said VR Systems doesn’t have control over.
“It holds us accountable when the operability between the TEAM system and our system, Voter Focus, is broken,” Martin said. “It doesn’t take into account that it may be broken because TEAM made a change to their software, or TEAM is down, or something at the state that could be causing it. But there are penalties in the software that could be levvied on us, all for things that are outside of our control. So, from a legal standpoint, we cannot accept that.”
In his email, Calvert cautioned that the pact, as written, also makes the company responsible for issues that may arise at the county level.
“The draft makes VR Systems responsible for data handling, security incidents, backups, and operational failures that depend entirely on County employees, County infrastructure, and County policies — in effect asking the vendor to assume legal responsibility for how the County runs its own computers,” Calvert added.
Democratic DA candidate Shannon Locke — who spoke at last Tuesday’s meeting to urge the process along — distilled it even further for the casual tech user.
“That’s like holding Microsoft accountable for how fast you type,” Locke told the Current.
Apples and Oranges
Further, the contract appears to describe a different product than the one VR Systems is offering, according to both Martin and Calvert.
“VR Systems provides on-premises software installed on County-owned computers, servers and operated by County staff, yet the contract treats the system as if it were a cloud-hosted, vendor-controlled service,” Calvert maintains in his email.
Martin said the inclusion of language about cloud-based storage was likely based on the cloud-based vendor Bexar County formerly contracted with, VOTEC. That company abruptly went out of business in August, causing the county to lose access to the voter data the vendor stored in the cloud, according to Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew.
“It could be that they were writing the contract to guard against the pitfalls of the previous system, and that doesn’t reflect our product,” Martin said. “It’s apples and oranges.”
Martin said it’s possible that the DA’s office simply has a fundamental misunderstanding of how voter registration systems work.
“It could be mostly that,” he added.
Whatever the reason, the contractual impasse threatens to delay the process further.
“Because the draft strays so far from the BuyBoard framework and lacks vendor approval, advancing it would almost certainly result in immediate rejection or renegotiation after the vote, delaying implementation rather than advancing it,” Calvert said in his email.
In his email to the Current, Roberson from the DA’s office rejected any suggestion that he tried to slow the process, stating “any assertion that I caused or intentionally delayed this matter is demonstrably inaccurate.”
Martin said he’s still hopeful a finalized contract can be signed at the February Commissioners Court meeting — assuming the county works off the standardized contract. The other key, he added, is “open communication.”
According to Martin, the county hasn’t shared an official version contract with him since November. However, he got a glimpse of the new document days before the meeting, prompting him to book a last-minute flight.
“I became aware on Friday that there’s another version of the contract that we haven’t seen officially,” he said. “It’s not been sent to us, so we’ve not had an opportunity to respond to it. But in looking at it — because it was provided to us by a commissioner — it’s even more distasteful than the one that we couldn’t sign last time.”
Still on the TEAM (for now)
Meanwhile, Bexar County is left to contend with a lagging statewide voter registration system supplied by the Texas Secretary of State’s office. County Elections officials said the state’s software isn’t intended for use by a municipality of Bexar’s size. This resulted in yet another voter registration backlog ahead of the March primary.
Leading up to February’s deadline for the March primary, Bexar had a backlog of nearly 7,000 unprocessed voter registrations, which it reportedly cleared this Tuesday. In the fall, the county amassed a backlog of more than 70,000 and cleared it days before the November election. Both times, county officials blamed the Secretary of State’s system.
VR Systems’ product would interact with the state’s revamped system, called Team 2.0, but the vendor said its onsite storage and system access would allow Bexar County to remain operational in event the state system goes down.
Martin said he’s not sure why the process to switch over has taken so long in Bexar County. If Bexar had finalized the contract in August or September after VR Systems sent the standard contract in July, the county could have already gone live in time for the March primary, he asserted.
Indeed, since previous Bexar contractor VOTEC went belly up in August, several other counties previously relying on VOTEC have been able to sign contracts and get VR Systems implemented — those being Collin, Grayson, Hidalgo and Nueces.
A total of 14 other Texas counties have already contracted with VR Systems, including Tarrant, El Paso and Denton. In his remarks at Commissioners Court, DA candidate Shannon Locke argued that Bexar County should adopt Tarrant County’s contract, as it’s a county of similar size.
Legislative pressure
Third-party vendors are nothing new when it comes to Texas counties’ voter registration systems. Actually, they’ve long been the norm. As of April 2025, 75% of Texas voters’ data was handled by third-party systems, according to a report by media outlet VoteBeat.
Bexar County also already has the money set aside for a third-party vendor — more than $1 million — due to its prior contract with VOTEC.
During last year’s regular session of the Texas Legislature, lawmakers introduced a bill that proposed requiring all 254 of the state’s counties to join the Texas Secretary of State’s TEAM system, which the office provides to counties free of charge.
State Elections Director Christina Adkins argued during a 2024 House Elections Committee hearing that requiring all Texas counties to move over to TEAM would enable the state to keep a better eye on how local elections officials purge ineligible voters from the rolls, VoteBeat reported.
Republicans, both in Texas and nationwide, have also long sought to prove the existence of widespread voter fraud. However, Brookings Institute analysis demonstrates that, over the past 25 years, voter fraud nationally has represented “a minuscule .0000845%, and no election outcome was altered by ballot fraud throughout that time period.”
Despite the state’s efforts to bring every county onto TEAM, Denton County Elections Administrator Frank Phillips said it would be a grave mistake having all of the state’s voter rolls tied up in a single system, given the risk of cyber attacks or a major outage.
“If something catastrophic were to happen — ransomware, software failure — at least 75% of the voters in Texas would be fine [thanks to third-party systems],” Phillips told VoteBeat at the time.
Ultimately, SB 2382 was left pending in committee. But VOTEC’s sudden shutdown forced many onto the statewide system anyway.
Counties using TEAM have reported problems with the system since it was first launched in 2004, records show. In a 2007 state audit, nearly half of Texas’ 254 counties reported the system was slow and didn’t allow them to “perform their jobs effectively.”
More than a decade later, counties still report TEAM can take anywhere from minutes to hours to produce a standard report using election data within the system, according to the Texas Tribune. Those reports could be something as mundane as producing a list of county voters who have requested an absentee ballot.
Other users have complained that they sometimes input a voter’s registration information only for it to disappear, forcing them to waste time reentering it, the Tribune also reports. This month, officials with the Bexar County Elections Department said they were once able to process 24 applications an hour, but that number has dropped to eight.
Despite other counties’ willingness to go with VR Systems as an alternative to TEAM, it appears Bexar is stuck with the state system — for now, anyway.
Once Bexar County finalizes its contract with VR Systems, Martin says it still could take up to two months for implementation, which includes installation and training — and that could be pushed back if the number of Texas counties signing onto its system continues to swell.
Martin added that during a meeting earlier this month of the Texas Association of County Elections Officials, representatives from several other counties spoke to him about wanting to switch to VR Systems.
“We were approached by a lot of existing TEAM counties that are very unhappy with TEAM,” Martin said, adding that the company only takes one county live at a time to minimize risk.
“So, if they approach us looking to sign a contract, Bexar pushes back.”
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