In her final year overseeing Bexar County’s elections, Jacque Callanen used up the last of the paperclips that brought down her predecessor 22 years earlier.
The memorable 2002 election and its two-page ballot — unheard of at the time — infuriated local officials when paper-clipped ballots hamstrung the counting and delayed results by three days.
It’s the type of monumental flub Callanen has successfully avoided in the almost two decades she’s served as Bexar County’s elections administrator, which will come to a close on Jan. 24.
This year Bexar County officials overseeing her position determined new leadership was needed to meet the needs of a growing county.
In a nod to their concerns, this November Bexar County voters cast 14,000 fewer ballots than in 2020, despite a 9.7% increase in the number of registered voters from the last presidential election.
Yet, as they watch Callanen go, many political operatives and elected officials are also filled with anxiety about finding a suitable replacement.
Bexar County hired a recruiter on Friday to begin a nationwide search for an elections administrator who can withstand erratic policy changes, political targeting of Texas’ major urban centers and increased harassment that’s sent many in the industry running for the exits.
Throughout a host of new election integrity efforts in Texas, Callanen’s close adherence to the rules has kept her out of the fire of conservatives — and even won her praise from a local Republican Party chair who served on the county’s ballot board.
Yet long lines to vote and lower-than-expected turnout in the Nov. 5 election have once again raised questions about whether the elections department is meeting its responsibility to provide access and awareness to a wide range of voters.
Callanen, for her part, says she’s going out on a high. Voter participation was down statewide this November, and her final election featured very few complaints, either from the voting rights advocates who sued her in the past or the conservative elections judges the state deputized to oversee her work.
“I would call it successful,” Callanen said in an interview at her office. “Those who wanted to vote voted.”
An increasingly litigious landscape
Despite her sparkling reputation among fellow elections officials, Callanen hasn’t escaped partisans’ ire in her capacity as elections chief.
While officials in other counties have sought to expand voting access with efforts like increasing the number of polling locations and allowing drive-thru voting, Callenen has resisted calls from county leaders who want her to pursue similar ideas, and she’s twice been sued for operating too few voting locations, forcing last-minute additions to comply with judges’ orders in 2020 and 2022.
A full cardboard box by her desk holds a stack of lawsuits naming her personally. New to the collection this election cycle is a lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued the county for hiring a voter registration vendor — something Callanen urged county commissioners not to do.
Still Callanen’s fans — and they are legion — say she’s picked her battles appropriately and stayed out of the state’s crosshairs. Republican lawmakers eliminated Harris County’s elections administrator position after the county’s efforts to add polling sites ended in a ballot paper shortage that Callanen refers to as “the Harris nightmare.”
By comparison, Callanen has focused her energy on adapting to the state’s changing rules, even when they’ve made her job harder. Since she was first hired by the office in 1996, Texas moved to electronic voting in 2003 — only to return to paper ballots in 2020.
Perhaps the most sweeping changes came in 2021, when a Texas election law cracked down on mail-in voting — and criminalized actions of elections administrators who fall out of line.
Callanen said news of big changes often elicits a few choice words from her, shouted from her office to a sea of cubicles around her. But she doesn’t fundamentally disagree with the state’s perspective.
She’s not fond of the law’s changes curtailing a spouse or parent’s ability to request a mail ballot on behalf of a family member, which she said hurt people with disabilities in particular.
No matter how heartbreaking their scenario, Callanen said, breaking these rules could put her or her staff members in serious legal trouble.
She also lamented the law’s requirement that voters must remember to use the same identification number — either Social Security or driver’s license number — on both the mail ballot application and the ballot.
“We don’t like SB1,” she concluded of the 2021 voting law. “I understand the need for it. I understand the background behind it. But what the Legislature didn’t realize is, who votes the mail ballots the most? Seniors.”
In other ways, however, she said some of the eccentricities of Texas’ voting procedures have helped strengthen trust in elections.
For example, Texas requires that each mail ballot signature be verified by a pair of officials from both parties — or thrown out if it can’t be matched — slowing the process tremendously to add a layer of trust among partisans.
“I personally think the way the mechanism works is marvelous,” said Callanen, who has garnered great respect from the party officials overseeing her work.
A tough job in a growing county
Sitting behind her desk the Thursday after the election, Callanen is exhausted. She has a cough, as do several other members of her 24-person staff. She said that’s typical, as the adrenaline of the election begins to drain from their bodies after months, then weeks, then days of round-the-clock work.
Industry leaders point to those patterns as problematic for their field, where newcomers aren’t as eager to trade work-life balance for the job’s patriotic aspects.
At 79, Callanen walks slowly; a sheriff’s deputy held her gently by the arm on Election Day as she walked back and forth from the elections office to the hotel parking lot across the street where local media were posted up all day.
She speaks quietly and with a slight tremor, but there is vigor in her voice when she talks about the sacred civil right of voting, which she has devoted her career to protecting.
After Bexar County’s elections administrator was dismissed in 2002, Callanen, who had been a third-grade teacher, was eventually promoted to take over.
“As I was learning I would step into every single position in the office,” Callanen explained of her process. “I needed to do it to manage it; that was my philosophy.”
For more than two decades, a reminder of the delayed 2002 election has been a massive bucket of paperclips, which her predecessor purchased from every vendor he could find to fasten the two-page ballots together.
While well-intentioned, Callanen said, he mistook the amount of time that extra step would add when counting hundreds of thousands of ballots.
In a county that’s grown by more than 100,000 registered voters since the last presidential election, some of Callanen’s critics say she too has at times failed to account for the scale of the department’s decisions.
Most notably, she’s worked to maintain voting locations in the same places from year to year, even when those locations could no longer accommodate additional voting machines or parking adequate enough to move voters through quickly.
“I believe in my heart that the people who [wait in long lines do so] because they trust that location,” said Callanen, who noted that her office tried to redirect voters to nearby locations with shorter wait times in this past election.
“Was I sorry there [were] lines? Absolutely. Was I thrilled that there were lines? You better believe it,” she said. “I mean, that’s what we do. We want people to come out. So it’s a real catch-22. Yes, I’m held responsible because there’s lines. I get it.”
Other large counties have also started outsourcing other parts of the job, like printing mail ballots. But Callanen, who said she has a hard time trusting outside vendors, retains as much of the process in-house as possible.
“I would rather — and I do — keep everything in this building,” she said.
Finding a replacement
Most elections officials agree there’s a personality type that dominates their industry, and Callanen says she’s no exception, referring to herself as both “Type A” and having a “logical mind.”
“I can sit back and put the puzzle together,” Callanen said. “I may not be able to build every piece of the puzzle, but I know where it fits. That comes with experience, it comes with trust, it comes with knowledge, comes with support.”
To people whose jobs rely on smoothly run elections, losing that is terrifying.
At a politics panel before the election, San Antonio political consultants Laura Barberena, a Democrat, and Kelton Morgan, a Republican, praised Callanen’s work, while openly worrying about the future of Bexar County elections.
San Antonio is six months away from electing a new mayor — on an election day that will overlap with Fiesta Flambeau for the first time in either of their memories.
“The fact that we don’t have a new elections administrator — or at least the search for it even started — we should have done this two years ago,” Barberena said at the time.
Callanen said she believes her second in command, Chief Deputy Elections Administrator James Huerta, could step in if a new candidate hasn’t been installed in time for the municipal election. Callanen, Huerta and their teams will begin preparations for the May municipal election starting next month.
Callanen chose Jan. 24 as her final day on the job so she could take part in one more ritual that her office has long cherished: Regrouping after a grueling presidential election to watch the inauguration together over brunch.
“They leave their politics at the door. … And it’s just a moment of joy and celebration,” Callanen said. “It’s a most relaxing, proud, loving moment that we do, and I didn’t want to miss that.”
Many of her employees have been there as long as she has, and she said she’ll miss their family-like camaraderie.
“One of the most proud moments I will have is the feeling of love and support that we have in this office, and we have with our elections officials,” Callanen said.
Tammy Patrick, chief executive officer for programs of The Election Center, a trade group representing elections professionals, said that in the face of talent pipeline issues, many elections administrators are now coming from other industries.
But in Texas, she added, there’s an added challenge, because of the importance of understanding the state’s election laws.
“Election officials who are thinking about finding a new office to govern or a new community to serve will think long and hard about how election officials have been treated in that jurisdiction,” she said. “I think that will weigh heavily on anyone contemplating moving to a new community to serve.”
Even if Bexar County can find that, Patrick said, replacing Callanen is still a tough act.
“Jacque is a national treasure,” she said.
