A commission created by San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones released a report on Wednesday highlighting ways to increase voter turnout in the city and county.
The report explored nine ways to build a culture of voting through ongoing efforts to provide voter information and boost turnout year-round, rather than only in the weeks leading up to elections.
Some recommendations suggest collaborations with nonprofits or creating funds for specific initiatives. Others propose restructuring the city’s civic engagement efforts. You can read the full report here.
Jones kicked off a news conference Wednesday to highlight the commission’s findings, saying she believes the city should take a leading role in increasing voter engagement.
“As we know, the mark of a citizen is voting,” said Jones. “As we also know, unfortunately, at the federal level and at the state level, there are some really strong efforts to make it harder for people to be heard at the ballot box,”
The recommendations include:
- Transform the City of San Antonio’s Communications and Engagement Department into a dedicated Office of Civic Participation with expanded authority, mission, and community accountability
- Leverage city administrative and fiduciary authority to engrain civic participation access across all city-funded venues, events, projects, and partners
- Establish a civic engagement nonprofit coordination roundtable as a collaboration hub
- Establish a city-supported community civic engagement fund and strategic corporate partnership program to sustain nonpartisan civic participation infrastructure in San Antonio
- Launch a city-supported culture of voting initiative to build long-term civic participation habits among San Antonians
- Establish annual municipal civic participation goals
- Expand polling location availability during municipal, bond, and local ballot initiative elections
- Establish a city-managed centralized voting information hub with proactive multichannel outreach
- Standardize dormitory addresses for voter registration purposes across San Antonio university and college campuses
The first recommendation would adjust the city’s Communications and Engagement Department to an office of civic participation. Currently the department handles official communications to the public and oversees most citizen input to the city among other responsibilities.
Drew Galloway served as facilitator to the commission in drafting the report. He said if that does happen it would be up to the city council.
“That would be a place where rather than individual departments at the City of San Antonio going out and trying to engage the public, there’s like a centralized place for that work to happen, and it also gives a centralized place for information to go out to the public, for public information to come into the city,” he said.
Other initiatives, like creating a culture of voting, examine what may cause low voter turnout.
Many San Antonians, particularly “younger residents, families in low-engagement neighborhoods, and communities with historically strained relationships with government institutions, have not developed voting as a consistent personal or family habit,” the report states.
Much of the commission’s need was driven by low voter turnout in San Antonio and Bexar County, especially in off-year elections.
Bexar County has about 1.3 million registered voters. The City of San Antonio has close to 850,000 registered voters.
Turnout during recent elections has varied with some elections garnering less than 10% of registered voters showing up to the polls during the May 2025 election, which saw the entire city council on the ballot. The citywide mayoral runoff a month later, when Jones was elected, saw 17% turnout.
By comparison, the 2024 general election in November saw a nearly 60% voter turnout.
The City of San Antonio does not manage elections. That responsibility rests with the Bexar County Elections Department which oversees registering the county’s residents to vote, sets up polling locations, and tallies, canvases, and reports election results.
Jones announced her intent to create the commission or task force in February. She brought it up for a council vote in April, but council members decided to move the discussion to a later date. Although it carried the name “commission,” Jones said the group was organized as a task force rather than a formal commission.
Its formation was announced in May.
“There’s no ordinance that says it has to be a commission (or) has to be started by ordinance,” Jones said. “So, what I think is most important, and is exactly what I did, which is get started on the work,” she said. “I wanted to, as a chief elected officer in the city, understand what more we could do at the local level to help our community understand the issues, but also engage more in the process.”
Some of the suggestions would likely come with a price tag. The city is expected to face a multi-million-dollar budget deficit over the next two years. That’s forcing the city to come up with ways of increasing revenue like property tax increases, adding to certain city fees, or cutting some services.
“As we look at other things in our community, and obviously you hear me question the utility and, frankly, the return on investment to the community of some of the things that we currently invested in our budget, and I think this issue should be right alongside some of those other things,” she said.
The commission is not Jones’ first attempt to change the way the city engages in voting. Last year she successfully led a narrow 6-5 vote to move the city’s elections from May of odd years to November of odd years.
This story first appeared at Texas Public Radio.
