As San Antonio voters return to the polls for a hugely consequential mayor’s race and City Council runoff elections, the Bexar County Elections Department is taking heat for posting — and then revising — an early voting schedule that didn’t include any weekend voting hours.
Election day voting for the runoff is Saturday, June 7, with polls open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
An early voting schedule noting that “poll sites will not be open on weekends” was posted to the department’s website shortly after the May 3 election.
But after voting rights advocates and local Democrats complained, a new schedule that included weekend voting hours had replaced it by Tuesday morning.
The new schedule shows an eight-day early voting window instead of six days, with hours varying by date from May 27 through June 3. Polls will now be open on Saturday, May 31, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and on Sunday, June 1, from noon to 6 p.m.
The Bexar County Elections Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among the races on the June 7 ballot, San Antonio voters will be weighing in on mayoral contest that’s drawn state and national attention.
The nonpartisan race is now down to a head-to-head matchup between Democrat-backed Gina Ortiz Jones and Republican-supported Rolando Pablos for a position both parties say is important to their future success in Texas.
After remarkably low turnout in the first round of voting, Democrats were quick to suggest that cutting weekend early voting availability would disproportionately hurt Jones and other progressive council candidates by making it harder for their supporters to vote.
“People in San Antonio who work Monday through Friday, long hours and multiple jobs, caring for both children and elderly family members rely on early voting availability on weekends,” said Democratic activist Kathy Vale, who represents Precinct 2 on the Bexar County Elections and Voter Engagement Advisory Committee.
“With San Antonio’s already embarrassingly low voter turnout in this municipal election — where less than one in 10 registered voters cast their vote — I expect we will always do everything possible to encourage voter turnout and make it easy as possible for San Antonio to early vote in the consequential runoff election,” Vale said.
She and Bexar County Democratic Party Chair Michelle Lowe Solis, who serves on the Elections Commission tasked with hiring the county’s elections administrator, were among those who reached out with their concerns to get the schedule changed.
Local Republicans, meanwhile, have pointed to low turnout in the first round as evidence the county is wasting money operating so many early voting locations. Early voting in the May 3 election finished with in-person turnout down about a third from San Antonio’s last city election in 2023.
“I think they need to consolidate sites where they had low turnout and work on those other sites that were producing higher amounts [of voters],” said Bexar GOP Vice Chair Kyle Sinclair, who wasn’t aware of the evolving weekend early voting plans. “More is not better. In some cases, less is better. Less sites is not restricting voters, it’s getting the best bang for your buck.”
The elections department hasn’t yet announced the number of voting locations and where they’ll be located, though leaders of the two parties have been fighting over this issue for years.
The Bexar County Elections Department is under new leadership this year for the first time in roughly two decades after longtime elections chief Jacque Callanen resigned in June.
Callanen had her own disagreements with voting rights advocates, who sued her twice to open more polling locations, and was replaced by new Elections Administrator Michele Carew in March.
A high-interest runoff?
All San Antonio voters are eligible to participate in the June 7 mayoral and council runoffs, even if they didn’t cast a ballot in their first round.
The deadline to register to vote for the runoff election is May 8.
Though turnout was weak in the May 3 race, some political strategists say there could be more interest in the runoff, when voters are just choosing between two candidates.
“San Antonio does something weird that I don’t ever see anywhere else, and that is, it would not be out of the realm of possibility that the runoff has higher turnout than the first round,” said San Antonio political strategist Kelton Morgan. “You saw that in
2017 and 2019.”
