Several of Texas’ large urban counties have a new plan to boost voter participation ahead of the 2024 presidential election: hiring an outside company to find and register new voters.

It’s the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between counties that want to make voting easier and a state with a Republican-led legislature pushing in the opposite direction.

On Tuesday, Bexar County Commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of asking county staff to find roughly $600,000 for a subscription to Civic Government Solutions (CGS), which keeps a database of unregistered voters, tracks voters as they move from other places and mails out prefilled voter registration forms with prepaid return envelopes.

It’s the type of work normally done by nonprofit groups, political parties and individual campaigns, which target likely supporters based on their voting history or other data they’ve collected.

CGS, on the other hand, says it targets all potentially eligible voters and uses a “proprietary database” to identify people who wouldn’t normally appear in commercial voter files. 

“We send each potential voter in your universe customized persuasive messaging and state-specific instructions,” the company’s website says. When people receive that information along with the prefilled form and envelope, it says, “this combination of materials has proven to maximize returns.”

The politics of voting

Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2), who brought the idea forward, said he learned about it from Harris County, which voted in April to pursue a roughly $1 million voter registration effort with CGS.

Travis County Commissioners voted to hire CGS at the beginning of 2024 and could spend up to $500,000 for its services this year. Dallas County has been in talks with the company as well, according to CSG.

“This is not, from my perspective, a Democrat or Republican agenda item,” Rodriguez told the San Antonio Report. “It’s how do we get more people civically engaged? How do we make it easier for them?”

But the move is already drawing complaints from some local Republicans who’ve balked at the idea of using public funds to boost voter turnout in a Democratic stronghold.

Bexar County Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3), the court’s lone Republican, pulled the item for discussion at Tuesday’s meeting and cast the sole “no” vote. Two other local GOP activists also signed up to speak against the idea.

“There are dozens of organizations out there who are engaged in registration today on the right and the left,” Moody said at the meeting. “…Trying to maximize turnout in a Democratic county months before the election, the appearance doesn’t look good.”

In an interview Thursday, CGS CEO Jeremy Smith said that’s an argument he’s fighting across the state while expanding into Texas.

“Everyone’s initial suspicion is that somebody must be doing this to gain an advantage, and maybe some of them believe they are getting one,” said Smith, a special operations U.S. Army veteran from Grapevine, Texas.

“But efforts to make it easier to vote, when you look at other states around the country, have produced no change in the partisan tilts of those states,” he said.

In Bexar County, CGS has already identified 250,000 potential targets based on its public data compilation — which it estimates is about 75% of all the eligible unregistered voters in the county.

“Because of the [Democratic] tilt of Bexar County… taking a wide, nonpartisan approach means that, percentage-wise, this will benefit local Republican residents more in terms of bringing them up to kind of par,” Smith said.

Counties fight back

Plans to hire out voter registration efforts come as Texas has already cracked down on other ideas to make voting easier, such as longer voting hours and drive-thru polling locations.

But Rodriguez, who served in the legislature before joining commissioners court in 2019, said this new approach is still well within counties’ state-given authority.

The election code says counties are responsible for voter registration, he said, and CGS’s approach is “an innovative way to work within the scope of that particular framework.”

“There are jurisdictions around the state — whether it’s the elections administrator or some other elected person running the elections office — that are taking a different approach to voter registration,” he added. “It’s not simply making the forms available at an office, it’s outreach, it’s being more proactive.”

Up until now, Bexar County hasn’t been one of those jurisdictions.

While many of the state’s urban counties attempted to make voting easier through additional voting locations and better voter outreach — and faced pushback from the state for doing so, Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen has resisted pressing the limits of her office’s authority. This has earned her criticism from voting rights advocates, as well as some commissioners, who wanted the county to do more.

This November will be the last election Callanen oversees after handing in her resignation earlier this month.

She didn’t respond to a request for comment about the outside vendor.

“This is not a knock against Jacque… We know she runs a very tight ship,” Rodriguez said of the plans to supplement her department’s work. “Rather than burden her with some extra responsibility in her last six months or so, I figure let’s outsource it.”

CGS is purchased by subscription to keep the data fresh, Smith said. It’s designed to keep costs low by preventing municipalities from having to employ their own data engineers and analysts.

If a county wants to end its subscription and move that data in house, it can do so, he said.

Change on the horizon

In addition to the voter registration vendor, the commissioners on Tuesday also approved reviving and reconstituting the county’s Elections & Voter Engagement Advisory Committee.

That panel was created in 2019 to advise the court on how the elections department can better serve various demographics of voters, but never materialized due to the pandemic.

Under Tuesday’s agreement, each commissioner and the county judge will choose one representative to advise the county as it embarks on a national search for its next elections chief.

That move drew immediate cheers from voting rights advocates that have long been at odds with Callanen and twice sued to force her to operate more polling locations.

“This moment marks a crucial step in our collective efforts to ensure a fair, transparent, and inclusive electoral process in Bexar County,” leaders of Texas Civil Rights Project, MOVE Texas, and Texas Freedom Network said in a joint statement Tuesday.