In February, Bexar County approved the contract for a new voter registration system after grappling for months with Texas’ lagging and glitchy system. However, one more roadblock remains before the county can free itself of the old system: the State of Texas itself.
In an April 28 letter to Bexar County officials obtained by the Current, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson states that, even though the county has approved a contract with new vendor VR Systems, her office doesn’t plan to follow the county’s implementation timeline.
That delay threatens to get in the way of Bexar County going online with the new system in time for November’s consequential midterm elections, according to Precinct 4 County Commissioner Tommy Calvert.
To Calvert, Nelson’s letter to Bexar County Judge Peter Sakai and other county officials wasn’t a typical missive from a state agency — it seems angry.
“I definitely saw it as a ‘Go to hell,'” said Calvert.
The new system was initially approved by county commissioners in September. Nelson’s delay follows a half-year slowdown at the county level over a contractual impasse before the finalized contract was approved in February.
Nelson — an appointee of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott charged with overseeing state elections — sent her letter in response to a request from Bexar County officials that her office expedite providing the voter data county elections officials need so they switch to the new third-party voter system. Calvert cosigned the county’s letter.
The implementation proposal approved by the county set an April 30 deadline for delivery of the first batch of data from the state’s TEAM 2.0 system so it could be uploaded, according to a copy of the county’s letter, also obtained by the Current.
Instead of receiving that data, county officials got weeks of radio silence from the Secretary of State’s office, followed by Nelson’s letter calling the county timeline “unrealistic.”
The office of Sakai did not respond to a request for comment by press time. A spokesperson for Elections Administrator Michele Carew declined to comment on the story. However, the Secretary of State’s office provided the following statement:
“The state has had 5 successful elections using the new TEAM system. Our staff has been working day and night to address any issues as they arise. We will be working with Bexar County on a reasonable schedule.”
Communication breakdown
In Bexar County’s letter to Nelson, Sakai lays out a timeline of delays and “limited communication” from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office as county elections personnel sent repeated requests for cooperation to ensure timely implementation of the new voting system.
Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew first reached out to Leticia Salazar, the Texas Secretary of State’s director of elections administration, on March 26 “to begin the data migration process,” according to Sakai’s letter. After she received no response, Carew sent a followup to Salazar on March 30, the letter states.
On April 1, Salazar responded with the mandatory Vendor Authorization Form for Carew to fill out, which she completed and returned the following day. After two more weeks of radio silence, Carew sent another followup on April 16.
“As of April 22, we received an email from Leticia Salazar confirming that the County’s request for data export has been received and forwarded to the State’s vendor, Civix. However, we still do not have confirmation that the request for timely data migration will be fulfilled,” Sakai’s letter stated.
Is the slowdown deliberate on the part of the Secretary of State’s office? Abbott’s history of picking fights with Texas’ blue-led cities and counties such as San Antonio and Bexar certainly begs the question.
“I think that there’s been a lot of smoke and it’s up to them to put it out,” Calvert said. “This is something that appears to be dragging out, and it’s very suspicious.”
In her April 28 letter, Nelson disputes the timeline Sakai laid out, stating “Bexar County did not inform my team of your contractual deadlines with your new vendor until April 21, 2026 — the day before you sent us your letter.”
Nelson’s letter also describes what she called a “Herculean effort” by her office to onboard Bexar County to the state system ahead of the November 2025 election. That came after a prior vendor, Votec, abruptly went out of business in August.
Nelson said her staff “worked day and night and over weekends” to bring Bexar County online with the statewide TEAM system in time for early voting. She maintained that a turnaround that normally can take months was accomplished in a few weeks — and at a cost to her office exceeding $100,000.
However, Calvert said Bexar County spent $450,000 of its own money addressing the 70,000-voter backlog ahead of the fall election.
Beyond that, once online, the state’s TEAM system experienced massive errors, according to Bexar officials. Days before last fall’s election, county elections staffers, who were working in shifts, found 11,000 San Antonio streets missing from the state system.
“If we hadn’t found 11,000 streets that they were missing, we would have literally tens of thousands of people disenfranchised,” Calvert said of the error. “So, [Nelson] beating her chest like she was our hero? … We appreciate the work they did, but we carried the lion’s share of the cost.”
‘Unworkable’ deadline?
In her letter, Nelson acknowledged there was urgency to get Bexar County onto the state’s TEAM system last fall because her office feared potential lawsuits should the system not be up and running in time for the contentious Project Marvel vote.
“We took on this herculean effort knowing that if we did not onboard the state’s third-most-populated county, the November 2025 Election was at risk for a potential legal challenge, including the City of San Antonio’s ballot measure on funding for a new stadium for the San Antonio Spurs,” Nelson’s letter states.
Now, Bexar County needs Nelson’s office to cooperate with another tight turnaround and provide the county’s voter data to its new vendor, VR Systems, which already has contracts with 14 other Texas counties. However, Nelson is pushing back.
“Your request is to now go through this whole process again ahead of the November election to migrate data to a new system, under an unrealistic timeline based on your contract with a third-party vendor — a contract that my office is not a party to and has no legal obligations to meet,” Nelson stated in her letter.
Nelson goes on to state that her office sacrificed “core system functionality” and its ability to serve other Texas counties so it could prioritize Bexar County ahead of last fall’s election.
“However, you are now asking us to do the same thing,” she added.
The letter ends by stating: “The timeline that you suggest is unworkable.”
Given that Nelson’s office provided the data on all 18 million Texas voters to the Trump administration in January, Calvert said he doesn’t understand why it can’t provide a far smaller data set to Bexar County. Especially as the county attempts to abandon the glitchy state-provided TEAM system for its new vendor.
“This is a .CSV file. This is not quantum computing,” Calvert said, adding that the Secretary of State’s Office is now waiting on data from an election management software company, Civix.
“The fact that they’ve been trying to get [TEAM] working since August seems totally out of line,” Calvert said. “[Civix] really out to be held accountable for a lack of service to the Secretary of State’s office or the Secretary of State’s Office has got to figure out what’s going on internally with their management.”
Ahead of the March primary, Bexar County’s backlog grew once again — that time to more than 7,000 voters — as elections workers’ input times using the state’s TEAM 2.0 system slowed to a crawl. Once able to input 24 voters per hour, the lag dropped that number to just eight per hour.
County election workers also noted that screens sometimes failed to appear as they worked on TEAM 2.0. Other times, when staffers input data, it would evaporate into thin air, forcing them to submit it all over again. Further, the system attempted to send duplicate ballots to voters, sometimes as many as 13, officials say.
The county’s new vendor, VR Systems, is a Florida-based company whose software enables counties to host voter data on premises. That proximity gives counties protection from some of the slowdown issues and glitches experienced with the state’s system, according to VR officials.
Texas’ TEAM system isn’t equipped to handle a county of Bexar’s size, Bexar County Elections Administrator Carew told the Current in previous interviews. That makes the slowdowns more pronounced for the county’s database of 2 million voters.
The lags in data input created a backlog of over 70,000 voters ahead of last fall’s election — and this November’s contest is expected to attract a much larger number of voters.
Back of the line
As the Secretary of State pushes back against Sakai’s proposed timeline, two other Texas counties — Kaufman and Midland — have already gotten ahead of Bexar in the queue for implementation with VR Systems.
In January, the vendor warned that such a situation might occur based on the level of interest it received from Texas counties at a conference.
“We were approached by a lot of existing TEAM counties that are very unhappy with TEAM,” VR Systems’ Chief Operating Officer Ben Martin told the Current at a January Commissioners Court meeting. He added that the company only takes one county live at a time to minimize risk.
“So, if [other counties] approach us looking to sign a contract, Bexar pushes back,” he said.
Now, that scenario has come to pass, potentially jeopardizing Bexar County’s ability to go online with the vendor in time for the fall election. That would require the county staying on the state’s TEAM 2.0 system through an election with high stakes and high turnout.
More residents may be disenfranchised as a result, Calvert said. And that could lead to legal problems and further undermine faith in our elections.
“It means that the large numbers of people who are trying to register to vote in this election may not be inputted because of the slowness of the state system,” Calvert said. “It’s gotten a little better but it’s still not fully functional.”
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