Voter registration for the Nov. 5 election is closed.
Applications that came in at the last minute — Monday’s 5 p.m. deadline — will take a couple days to be processed before a finally tally of registered voters will be released.
Not sure if you’re registered? Visit the county elections website to check.
Early voting begins Oct. 21 and runs through Nov. 1.
The elections office always accepts voter registration applications, and those that come in after Monday’s deadline, assuming they are eligible, will be able to vote in the spring municipal election.
The Bexar County Elections Department announced last week that 1,283,302 Bexar County residents were registered — a record number, up from 1.23 million registered in 2022 and 1.19 million in 2020.
But the county’s population is rising at the same time, and it is difficult to accurately track whether voter registration levels are keeping pace. No government entity keeps numbers of how many people are eligible to vote but aren’t registered.
Unlike county voter rolls, which change every single day as new voters are registered and ineligible ones are removed, the county’s current population is only ever an estimate, extrapolated from U.S. Census Bureau data, which can be years old.
San Antonio Report 2024 Voter Guide
Our voter guide includes dozens of candidate responses to a list of questions prepared by our journalists, as well as profiles for every candidate on your Bexar County ballot, all the way to the bottom of the list of judicial races.
One company that does its own number-crunching on unregistered voters, Civic Government Solutions (CGS) estimates that roughly 68% of eligible Bexar County voters are registered — meaning almost one-third are not.
Last month, Bexar County leaders voted to spend $393,000 with Civic Government Solutions, LLC, to reach out to roughly 210,000 eligible voters before the election, sending them pre-filled voter registration forms and pre-paid return envelopes, then following up with text messages to encourage them to return the applications.
Bexar is one of several Texas counties Attorney General Ken Paxton sued for hiring CGS, which buys data from various sources to create a database of unregistered voters that wouldn’t normally appear in commercial voter files, for voter registration outreach.
However, his office didn’t request a temporary restraining order in Bexar County until after the applications were already mailed out.
Where to send your application
Last week, Bexar County Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen urged residents to mail their applications to Bexar County’s election office rather than directly to the Secretary of State’s Office.
“People might think they’re saving a step, but they send those applications back to us,” Callanen said. Applications must be postmarked by 5 p.m. on Oct. 7, which means if you’re filling your form out on Monday, you should hand deliver it to the elections office to ensure it’s counted by 5 p.m.
Bexar County will have 51 polling sites open from Oct. 21-Nov. 1, and voters can visit any one of them. Callanen urged voters to visit the elections website and input their address to see an individualized sample ballot.
An election-year spike
Though the number of registered voters so far for November is setting records, Callanen said she couldn’t say whether the spike in registrations is due to letters from CGS.
Voter registrations always rise in presidential election years, she said, and other groups, including political parties and volunteer registration organizations, are also working to get residents registered. The post office is delivering applications in multiple “big mail buckets” every single day, she said. But that doesn’t mean the people who filled out those applications are automatically registered.
Like every county in Texas, Bexar electronically sends all the applications it receives to the Secretary of State each night, which then determines the eligibility of those applicants. Only those deemed eligible by the Secretary of State’s office are added to the county’s database of registered voters.
The number of registered voters in Bexar County changes daily because of that process, and because of voters removed from the rolls because they’ve died or moved — a process that can take several years.
That’s because, per federal election law, voters cannot be removed from the rolls until they have not voted in two consecutive federal elections in a row. They are considered in “suspense” until then.
Different kinds of ‘purging the rolls’
Callanen said Bexar County purges those “suspense” voters after each federal election. In 2022, it purged about 44,000 people from the rolls based on that criteria.
Voters who are on the suspense list may still cast a provisional ballot, she said, and if it is determined that they are eligible, that ballot will be counted.
In August, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that Texas had removed roughly one million people from its voter rolls since he signed a legislative overhaul of the state’s election rules in 2021. That includes 463,000 who were on the suspense list and met the requirement to be removed.
Like other Texas counties, Bexar has seen a spike in challenges to its election rolls as presidential candidate Donald Trump and his allies repeat his false claims that “millions” of people voted illegally in 2020, costing him the election.
Callanen said that in Bexar County, those challenges peaked over the summer and have subsided somewhat. As in other counties, the vast majority of the challenges were already in the process of being dealt with, she said.
