Weeks after an untimely technology upgrade at the Secretary of State’s office sent counties into a panic over backlogged voter registrations, local party leaders and elections officials say the same update has muddled the state’s candidate-tracking portal as well, leaving them with incomplete lists as they start to assemble the March 3 primary ballot.
Republicans and Democrats run their own primaries in Texas, but lean on the Secretary of State’s office as a centralized source of candidate information.
Thanks to a series of hangups this year, including a drawn-out legal fight over the congressional maps and a new reporting system at the Secretary of State’s office, local party officials say the state’s candidate portal has been experiencing delays, and complete candidate lists still aren’t finalized.
A Secretary of State spokeswoman said Monday candidates for the primary file with the parties, whose officials enter their information directly to the portal. Between the state and local parties, she said, they should have complete lists to work with for their party primary elections in March.
County-level candidates file at their county party office, meaning local party chairs have those full records in-house.
But candidates for multi-county districts or statewide races file with the state parties, which saw a rush of last-minute filings and shuffles between races as the Supreme Court ruled on the congressional districts just days before the deadline.
On Monday, Bexar County Democratic Party Chair Michelle Lowe Solis and Republican Party of Bexar County Chair Kris Coons met with the Bexar County Elections Department to review a sample ballot based on records from the Secretary of State’s candidate portal.
But many candidates believed to have filed for office, particularly congressional candidates on the Republican side, were still missing from the list.
For example, Texas’ newly redrawn 35th Congressional District, which stretches southeast from San Antonio to include Guadalupe, Karnes and Wilson counties, added a number of Republican candidates from outside of Bexar County who didn’t show up on the state’s site until this week.
As did Texas’ 21st Congressional District, where the race to replace U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Dripping Springs) has grown to include more than a dozen Republicans.
“We’re trying to be understanding about it, because we know it’s a new system,” Coons said of the candidate portal. “We know [the Secretary of State’s office] is doing the best they can, we get that, but I would like to think that we will have all that information.”
The Secretary of State’s new candidate portal was part of a larger technology update to their voter registration system, known as TEAM, earlier this year.
The move came as a number of Texas counties, including Bexar County, had just lost their private voter registration vendor, and were scrambling to transition to the state’s system in time for the Nov. 4 election.
“TEAM rolled something out that was not ready for primetime,” Lowe Solis said. “That’s what caused the voter registration backlog prior to the November election, and there’s still issues with TEAM.”
Bexar County was able to address the backlogged voter registration issues by bringing on temporary staff, and Elections Administrator Michele Carew said Tuesday that she’s been working with the Secretary of State’s office to address ongoing problems with the TEAM system.
“Are there issues? Yes. They’re working through them and working on communicating with us,” Carew said. “They use a third-party vendor, so when we speak to the state, they take our concerns to the vendor, and then they rely on the vendor to answer.”
It’s unclear whether the county will continue using TEAM for its voter registration in the coming election. It identified VR System as a potential replacement earlier this year, but Carew said Tuesday that the move was “on hold.”
“The last I heard probably was about 30 or more days ago, and [the county was] still working with the other vendor, going through their contract,” she said.
The search for who is running
In the days since the filing deadline, candidates, party leaders and groups that organize candidate forums have all been on the hunt for complete candidate lists.
The Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Party of Bexar County used Google Docs to make their candidate lists available to the public for the March primary.
The Republican Party of Bexar County shared its list of local candidates with the San Antonio Report, while the Republican Party of Texas posted its list on its website.
Coons said the Bexar County Republican Party has full records of county-level candidates, but relies on the Secretary of State’s system to track the multi-county and statewide races.
“We get everything from the Secretary of State,” Coons said. “The Republican Party of Texas might have differing views of how things should be done, but I always follow the Secretary of State.”
Lowe Solis said she’d been conferring with the Texas Democratic Party on a candidate list that she used to hold a ballot order drawing last Friday. As of Monday, she believes all of the candidates are accounted for on official lists.
“My initial run-through of the sample ballot is that they have everybody on here,” she said. “I don’t know everybody, we’ve got a lot of people [running], but it seems that the Secretary of State has at least has our Democratic candidates.”
Third-party and independent candidates don’t appear on the March primary ballot, but file by the same Dec. 8 deadline, and as it stands, aren’t listed publicly on the Secretary of State’s portal.
Libertarians, for example, choose their nominees at a convention instead of in a primary. But party leaders still upload candidates to the Secretary of State’s portal, which only lists Republicans and Democrats on its dropdown menu.
“We’ve been fighting Secretary of State to open this up to third parties, but it has not been updated yet,” said JR Haseloff, chair at Libertarian Party of Bexar County.
Independent candidates file a declaration of intent to run with the Secretary of State and then gather signatures to get on the November ballot after the conclusion of the primaries.
That means in many cases, the state has the only records for independent candidates who’ve met that first bar, but are also not listed publicly online.
“Republicans and Democrats, all they have to do is pony up the money and they’re on the ballot,” said Jason Wolff, who is running as an independent candidate for Bexar County District Attorney. “An independent has to wait until after the primaries to get 500 signatures from qualified voters who did not vote in either primary … which leaves me about a month to get all those signatures [to qualify for the November ballot].”
A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office said that third-party candidates would be added the drop-down after they are nominated at their conventions. The independent candidates will be added once they’ve collected signatures and qualified to the ballot.
Here is the full list, as we know it, of Republicans and Democrats who have filed to run in the March primary elections for Bexar County races. A full primary Voter Guide will be available in the coming weeks.
