As the Bexar County Elections Department scrambled to process a backlog of voter registrations ahead of November’s election, some familiar with the office’s inner workings accused its chief of creating an unsustainable work environment.
Current and former department staffers who spoke to the Current detailed what they described as a toxic workplace full of retaliation, micromanagement and 90-hour work weeks under elections administrator Michele Carew, who took the job in March.
Amid those complaints, seven Elections Department staffers — or 20% of its workforce — have exited since Carew’s appointment, according to Winston Crump, the county’s former lead trainer of election judges. Five of those left within her first three months on the job.
“It was a good environment until Michele came along and drove it off a cliff,” Crump told the Current.
Six current and former staffers spoke to the Current for this story, including two who wish to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. All detailed what they describe as an unsustainable environment, adding that they wanted to speak out to protect Bexar County voters.
“You don’t understand the dangers she brings to the people,” said one anonymous former staffer.
Carew declined to be interviewed about the allegations. Instead, she said in a statement that she was focused on powering through Bexar County’s backlog of unprocessed voter registrations — which stood at 52,000 as of the county’s last public update on Oct. 6 — as her team worked around the clock to prepare for the upcoming election.
Late Tuesday night, the county announced that backlog had been cleared.
“My focus right now remains on the administration of official Bexar County Election business, particularly addressing the voter registration backlog and ensuring smooth election operations,” Carew told the Current last week prior to completing the work.
“[I] don’t believe it would be appropriate or productive to engage on those claims,” Carew said of the allegations leveled by current and former employees. “My priority is continuing to serve the public transparently and effectively through this critical period.”
The search is over
Carew took over as Bexar County election administrator after the retirement of Jacquelyn Callanen, a respected public servant who served two decades in the role. Staffers who spoke to the Current recall Callanen creating a warm, flexible work environment that enabled staff to bring their kids to work or eat lunch in the break room with family members.
When Callanen retired in November 2024, Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai announced that the county would conduct a nationwide hunt to fill the position. The county spent $50,000 to hire consulting firm Robert Half to conduct an executive search, the Express-News reports.
Several of the Elections Department insiders the Current spoke to said Carew wasn’t the county’s first or even second choice after county officials met with five finalists for the position. Two candidates turned down their respective job offers after being “horribly lowballed,” said Brian Nietfeld, who left his position as a GIS and data input specialist at the Elections Department just three weeks into Carew’s tenure.
In the end, Bexar County ended up with Carew, a former elections administrator from North Texas’ Hood County, which has a population of 69,000. In contrast, fast-growing Bexar County’s population exceeds 2.1 million.
“Two of them declined, and then they settled on Michele,” Nietfeld said. “So, they did not do their due diligence in interviewing and finding the replacement for Jacque.”
In 2024, the Bexar County Elections Administrator position was posted online offering an annual salary of $116,352, according to a listing on the site GovernmentJobs.com. In contrast, Callanen earned $163,632 a year at her retirement, according to a report by the Express-News.
The Current reached out to County Judge Peter Sakai and other members of the Bexar County Election Commission about Carew’s selection process but got no response by press time.
The Elections Commission is comprised of four Democrats and one Republican. One of those Dems is Michelle Lowe-Solis, chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party. She also was unavailable for comment at press time on her approval of Carew.
The Elections Commission voted for Carew unanimously.
Staff told the Current that when Carew began, they quickly got the sense that the workplace culture was about to change.
Power moves
“The difference between Jacque and Michele is night and day,” former GIS specialist Nietfeld said. “In some cases, she’s a very hostile boss, highly micromanaging.”
Soon after she began, Carew implemented a slew of rules, including a prohibition on wearing jeans, even though she herself continued to wear them, former trainer Crump said. Carew also forbade non-badged visitors from entering sensitive areas, although Nietfeld said she would regularly parade vendors without badges past sensitive voter information. The new administrator also expected long hours with minimal breaks, though former and current staff report she regularly came in late and left early.
“It’s very much ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’” Crump said of the sudden deluge of rules that he described as “dropping like anvils.”
“It’s the little things, but the little things are morale killers,” he added.
Though staff have been under pressure to process the backlog of voter registrations, multiple whistleblowers told the Current that long hours and working weekends are nothing new, and that a stressful environment is a constant when working in elections.
Still, they allege Carew made the situation worse.
“There were times where just the environment of the office was so stressful and you just never knew what to expect, it’s like, ‘What version of her are we going to get today?’” said former Assistant Elections Judge Trainer Erika Land who said she quit at the end of the summer, partly due to the pay and partly due to Carew’s leadership.
Current and former staffers also accused Carew of stripping away their coping methods for dealing with the stress.
Nietfeld, who has autism, says he left at the end of March, when Carew revoked his disability accommodations, including his approval to wear noise-cancelling headphones.
After attempting to adhere to Carew’s orders and enduring the sensory overload of the loud voter registration office, Nietfeld says he suffered a “full autism meltdown.”
Nietfeld filed a formal complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and had a meeting scheduled to discuss his case. However, the government shutdown prevented that meeting, he said, adding that the statute of limitations will likely expire by the time the EEOC resumes operation.
Nietfeld and other whistleblowers who spoke to the Current assert that Carew moved people’s desks on a whim in what they said was either a display of power, a bid to retaliate or an effort to improve her line of sight and allow her to see what was on employees’ computers.
Election Judge trainers Land and Crump said they were suddenly informed, via email, that they were required to move desks by the end of the day from their quiet, “closet-like” office. Though they weren’t given a reason, Land said she believes it was so Carew could keep a closer eye on them.
“It was because she wanted to be able to walk by and see what we were working on,” Land said.
Multiple whistleblowers who spoke to the Current said some of the people Carew relocated received word of the plans immediately following a disagreement with her.
Even so, during an earlier conversation with the Current, Carew said she has tried to minimize stress even as the county powers through its voter-registration backlog.
“I’m not breathing down anyone’s necks,” she said during an Oct. 6 interview addressing the backlog.
Whistleblower accounts tell another story.
Employees in the Elections Department mailroom were forbidden from locking the door even though there’s often sensitive voter data inside, because Carew wanted access at all times, according to multiple whistleblower accounts. Employees in all-glass “fishbowl” offices also were forbidden from hanging up posters, which would block Carew’s view into their work areas, according to Nietfeld.
“‘You should always feel like you’re being watched’ is what it felt like,” Land said.
Further, all six whistleblowers who spoke to the Current accused Carew of chronic absenteeism, stating that she left early to have dinner or drinks with vendors on numerous occasions, something they argue is frowned upon for its perceived conflict of interest.
Indeed, Carew left early with a vendor her first day on the job, according to Nietfeld.
“The optics on that are absolutely terrible,” he added.
Family affair
Over the first week in October, the county’s voter-registration staffers were expected to work 12-hour days and through the weekend to process the steep backlog of voter registrations. However, Nietfield told the Current such long hours are hardly out of the norm.
Around elections, it’s normal for staff to work 80- to 90-hour weeks, he added.
“When it’s election season, it’s all hands on deck, everybody’s there. You don’t see your family,” Nietfield said.
To make election time less taxing on employees who missed their loved ones, Callanen allowed staff members to have lunch with family members in the break room.
“That’s like the only 30 minutes we get to have with our family,” one former staffer who declined to be named said through tears. “I’m sorry. I’m getting emotional, because this is really frustrating to me because of how amazing Jacque was, and is, as a boss.”
When Carew took over the position from Callanen, the new administrator declared that family visits were over.
“That’s devastating to morale,” Nietfield said.
Best person for the job?
Carew’s LinkedIn shows she doesn’t have a college education, although she is a 1993 graduate of Weatherford High School. Despite the consultant-led nationwide search, the job description by Bexar County only listed a college degree as a “preferred” qualification.
According to LinkedIn, Carew served as deputy of elections for Parker County near Fort Worth, followed by a stint as elections administrator for Aransas County and then as elections administrator for Hood County. All of those counties have populations of less than 200,000.
“I think it became very apparent that she had not been the leader of anything very large,” former trainer Land said. “It was very apparent that she was not used to the scale of responsibility, the scale of decisions, how to lean on a team and it not just be her decisions.”
Multiple whistleblowers told the Current they doubt Carew was ready to handle such a large county with roughly 800 precincts after only having to manage a limited number of voting precincts and a much smaller population.
“Elections do not scale,” Nietfeld said.
Also raising eyebrows, while in Hood County, Carew ran as a “conservative Republican” to serve as county clerk, campaign ads show.
In a letter to the editor in the San Antonio Express-News, longtime Democratic political player Kathy Vale raised concerns about Carew’s political campaign, adding it ”should have auto-disqualified her candidacy.”
“We do not need PARTISAN CANDIDATES (either Republican OR Democrat) in this job,” Vale wrote.
Vale said that when she informed the Bexar County Elections Commission of Carew’s partisan background, she was told they were “unaware.”
Prior to running as a Republican for Hood County Clerk, Carew resigned from her position as the county’s elections administrator amid MAGA loyalists’ call for her removal as part of the “stop the steal” frenzy following the 2020 election.
Despite voting as a Republican for 11 years prior, Carew wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece about her departure that she was “apparently not Republican enough.”
What’s ahead
Nietfeld, as the former GIS expert, said the department hasn’t found a replacement for his particular skillset since he left. Without an in-house GIS specialist, he told the Current, he questions whether the county has accurately completed all of the unprocessed voter registration applications in time for the Oct. 20 start of early voting.
“There’s so many of those applications that have incomplete or wrong addresses that […] would get tossed over to my desk, and I would have to find them,” he said. “So, without a GIS person there to find these incomplete or bad addresses, no, you’re not going to get through 100%.”
Nietfeld cautioned that the situation could lead to a scenario where voters show up at their polling place and find they’re not in the system. In such a case, the voter would have to request a provisional ballot and hope their name can later be found in the system.
Further, Nietfeld said Elections Department higher-ups tasked him with data migration to the Texas Secretary of State’s TEAM system before Carew had even started in the position. Part of the reason for the recent backlog — which Carew has attributed to a data-migration issue — is because without Nietfeld, the county no longer has an in-house data-migration expert.
“I don’t believe Michele is a good data steward,” Nietfeld said. “She’s a rather vindictive person. I don’t like having my information in her department.”
Nietfeld said he felt so strongly about the issue that at the end of his resignation letter, he asked that his voter registration be revoked and his data removed from the system. Despite the county being required by law to scrub a voter’s data from the system if requested, he said he’s still listed as a registered voter.
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