Norma LaHood, center left, and Gloria Paxson, center right, hold campaign signs as they greet voters entering the Brook Hollow Branch Library on the first day of early voting for the March 3, 2026 primary election in San Antonio.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
Voters enter Brook Hollow Branch Library in San Antonio to cast their ballots on the first day of early voting for the March 3, 2026 primary election.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
During early voting for the March 2026 Democratic primary, Sybil Morgan walked to her polling place at Cody Library to ask a simple question: Had the Bexar County Elections Department received her mail-in ballot?
Morgan, 82, had used only one stamp and was worried that wasn’t enough postage. The election judge offered to call the elections department to find out — it was a slow morning at the North Side site, and Morgan was the only voter there.
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She sat on a couch a few feet away from the judge, so she could hear the conversation getting off to a rocky start.
“The judge said, ‘I’m not asking if you got her application. She’s received her ballot and returned it to you. We’re trying to find out if you have her ballot,’” Morgan recalled.
But after several more minutes of back-and-forth, the judge told her: “‘Oh, good — they found your ballot.’”
Yet when Morgan — who is also a Bexar County Democratic Party precinct chair — later received a list from the local party of people in her precinct who’d voted in the primary, her name wasn’t on it. Neither was her husband’s. He’d also voted by mail.
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She called the Elections Department to ask again about her ballot. An employee told her the office didn’t have her ballot, contradicting what she heard from the election judge during early voting.
She said she has repeatedly asked the Elections Department what happened but hasn’t gotten an explanation.
Kathy Vale, who served as an election clerk at the Tobin Library polling site during the March primary election, said “countless” voters showed up to vote in person because of problems with their mail ballots. Some voters told her about missing mail ballots. Others said they had requested a ballot for the Republican primary but received a Democratic one, and vice versa. Others received no ballot at all.
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Two polling-site officials and five voters told the San Antonio Express-News about missing mail ballots in three elections: the November 2025 election, which featured state constitutional amendments and a proposed Bexar County tax to pay for a portion of a new Spurs arena, the party primaries in March and the Democratic and Republican runoff elections in May.
Chris Welde, co-chair of the Bexar County Democratic Party’s Election Integrity and Voter Protection Committee, said she began hearing an increasing number of reports of mail-ballot problems during the March primary.
“I almost can’t go into a public meeting without someone telling me their story or a neighbor’s story about a problem with the mail ballots,” Welde added.
But there’s no official tally of mail-in ballot problems. The Elections Department does not formally track them, leaving officials and the public without a way to determine how widespread those problems have been.
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In response to an open records request, the department said it does not maintain a centralized log or database of complaints. It also said it keeps no other types of records of “complaints or inquiries” from voters.
Vale, who is also a member of Bexar County’s Elections and Voter Engagement Advisory Committee and Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones’ Commission on Voting, is one of several people who say they’ve struggled to get clear information from the county Elections Department.
The Express-News reached out to Bexar County Republican Party chairwoman Kris Coons about whether she knew of any problems with mail-in ballots in last November’s election or the GOP’s primary election or runoff this year. But she didn’t respond to several requests for comment.
The problems come as mail ballots receive renewed national scrutiny ahead of the Nov. 3 election, early voting for which starts Oct. 19 in.
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Last month, President Donald Trump — who has described voting-by-mail as “cheating,” although he personally votes by mail — sought to impose stricter mail ballot requirements that would’ve allowed the U.S. Postal Service to reject ballots that did not meet the new standards.
On Sept. 14, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s request to allow the rules to take effect for the November election.
But that national debate is separate from the concerns in Bexar County, where voters have struggled to determine whether the Elections Departments received their mail ballots and whether they were counted.
Lost in the mail?
Madeleine Dewar, an 85-year-old voter who lives in Beacon Hill, said she has been voting by mail without problems since she turned 65. At the beginning of each year, she marks the mail-in ballot application deadlines on her calendar.
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For the November 2025 election, she followed her usual routine.
“The ballot went back in the mail within a day or two. It never goes out late,” Dewar said.
Months later, after she’d already mailed her ballot for the March primary, Dewar began hearing from friends who had not received their ballots in the mail. It prompted her to check on the status of her ballots with the Elections Department. She was told it had received neither her March primary ballot nor the ballot she had cast in the November election.
Dewar ultimately voted provisionally in the March primary, but she had already lost the opportunity to do so in the November election.
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Provisional ballots are used when a voter’s eligibility cannot be immediately verified on election day. Officials review the ballots after election day to decide whether they should count.
“The only thing I could get from the Elections Department was that both ballots were lost in the mail, but I don’t believe that would’ve happened twice,” she said.
For other voters, the Elections Department’s online tools offered little clarity about whether the office had received their ballots.
For the past three elections, Lausanne Wiatrowski, a 73-year-old Lincoln Heights resident, said she could not get the “track my ballot” feature on the Bexar County Elections website to work. The Elections Department told her the data had not been updated because of glitches with the voter system platform.
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Wiatrowski said Elections Administrator Michele Carew, who’s overseen elections in Bexar County since March 2025, eventually informed her that the department had received two of her ballots. She said the department could provide no information about the third one.
Problems hard to identify
There is “very rarely one singular cause or issue” behind voter complaints involving mail ballots, said Matt Lamb, an elections researcher and political science professor at Texas Tech University.
Compared with voting in person, more can go wrong with mail ballots because voters fill out and send off their ballots without election workers present to answer questions or catch mistakes, he said.
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But he said documenting mail ballot problems and their causes is essential — not only to know where the process can be improved but also to maintain voter confidence.
“Conspiracy theories love a knowledge vacuum,” he said. “A voter is less likely to participate in the process again if their thinking is: ‘What’s the point if things are just going to be screwed up or elections processes can’t be trusted? ’”
Carew declined an interview request for this story.
However, in public meetings and other interviews, she has attributed problems with tracking and locating mail ballots to the state’s Texas Election Administration Management system, known as TEAM, which the county has been using since September 2025.
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TEAM stores and manages data that includes voters’ addresses, voting history, registration applications, images of their signatures for verification, and images of their mail-ballot envelopes.
The county switched to TEAM after Votec, a contractor that managed the county’s voter rolls, went out of business in summer 2025. Bexar County is one of several large counties in Texas that was forced to quickly pivot to TEAM.
The transition was rocky. The county went three months without any software to process voter registrations, so it accumulated a backlog of more than 70,000 voters to register in the weeks before last November’s election.
In an interview with the San Antonio Report, Carew said the system does not always show the current status of mail ballots, creating discrepancies in records and confusion among voters trying to track their ballots.
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“Even though we show that we received an application, we mailed them a ballot, the ballot came back and the ballot was counted, it’s not reflected in TEAM,” Carew said.
Under the county’s previous voter registration system, registrations submitted through the Department of Public Safety’s online driver’s license portal were processed automatically. Carew said TEAM eliminated that feature, requiring elections staff to manually process roughly 1,000 voter registrations each day from Bexar County residents renewing, replacing or updating their driver’s licenses.
That challenge has become more acute. Last month, Bexar County unexpectedly received about 45,000 unprocessed voter registrations from DPS.
The law enforcement agency said a problem with its online driver’s license portal had prevented tens of thousands of voter registrations from reaching county election offices across Texas. While it said the problem has been resolved, the agency has not publicly disclosed what the glitch was or what caused it.
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Bexar County approved a contract with a new vendor, VR Systems, in February to replace TEAM, and Carew initially hoped to have it running by March. But delays caused by a contract impasse and dispute with former Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson have pushed that roll-out to January.
“They are aware these problems still exist,” Carew said in commissioners court of the TEAM contractor hired by the secretary of state’s office. “The mail ballot problems are not for a lack of us putting in the history of the people voting by mail, it’s for a lack of a great voter registration system.”
TEAM trouble
Former Elections Department employees and voter registration advocates interviewed by the Express-News acknowledged limitations of the TEAM system and problems it has caused for both voters and staff. But some say the problems aren’t limited to TEAM.
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“The Elections Department is attributing all of the issues we’re having locally to issues out of their control, ” Welde said. “There’s no doubt TEAM can’t handle a county of our size, but the more I’ve learned about the department’s processes and people’s individual cases, the more I realize it’s not the only problem.”
Some point to another major change that came after Carew was hired in 2025 — the Elections Department began outsourcing mail-ballot printing and mailing to Arizona-based Runbeck Election Services.
County records show Bexar County paid $79,000 to Runbeck for printing services during the March primary and $32,000 for the November 2025 election.
Vale and Welde both said they began hearing more reports of problems after the department began using the new vendor. However, without records documenting mail ballot complaints and their causes, it’s impossible to determine whether Runbeck played a role in the problems reported by voters to the Express News.
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Carew told the Bexar County Election Commission on June 30 that more than 98% of mail ballots for the November 2025 election were delivered to voters. But Welde said the department has not provided a formal report or additional information showing how that percentage was calculated.
“‘Being delivered’ and being delivered to the intended recipient are two different things,” she added.
Runbeck did not respond to a request for comment.
The company has also faced scrutiny for its election work in other parts of the state.
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In 2021, Tarrant County cancelled its contract with Runbeck after a third of returned mail ballots were rejected by scanning machines because of illegible barcodes. Runbeck had printed the ballots and said at the time it was investigating the cause of the problem.
Spike in provisional ballots
Texas law requires voters who request a mail ballot but decide ultimately to vote in person to surrender their mail ballots at their polling place. If they don’t bring their mail ballot, they must cast a provisional ballot.
Vale said “99 out of 100” voters who came to Tobin Library during this year’s primary wanting to vote in person after requesting a mail ballot didn’t know they needed to bring their mail ballot.
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“I had one person run home to get it and come back, but that’s a very rare occurrence,” she said.
In March 2026, 1,054 voters in both party primaries cast provisional ballots, about 22% of which were rejected, according to departmental data. By comparison, voters cast 248 provisional ballots in the November 2025 election, and more than half were rejected.
Some fluctuation in provisional voting is standard, but a four-fold increase in one election to the next “warrants attention from the county,” said Lamb, the Texas Tech professor.
“I would think that Bexar County should examine whether something systematic is causing an increase like that,” Lamb added. “It may turn out that it was a one-time odd occurrence out of the county’s control, but it warrants investigating.”
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Mail ballot problems weren’t the only reason voters cast provisional ballots. Carew has said that voter registration problems, including issues involving registrations submitted through the DPS online driver’s license portal, also led some voters to vote provisionally.
Several voting locations — including Tobin Library, Cody Library and Mission Library — ran out of provisional ballots during early voting in March 2026, Vale said.
When Tobin Library ran out of provisional ballots on two separate days, poll workers called the Elections Department to request additional ones. It took two hours for the department to deliver the extra ballots on one of those days.
“During that window, any time there was a situation that required a provisional ballot, that voter was told, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to return later,’” Vale said.
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The process for submitting a provisional ballot is also time-consuming. The election judge is pulled off the floor to walk the voter through the detailed, step-by-step process for filling out a provisional ballot. The judge also has to sign and seal the ballot before they can return to the floor.
That can increase voting wait times, which were already long during the March primary. After the primary, Carew said some voters waited in line until 9 p.m. during the after-work peak during early voting.
Vale said the provisional ballot disruptions at Tobin Library, where voters in line were “already snaking between library shelves,” created additional delays.
Lamb said research suggests that “off-putting or negative” experiences at the polls — such as long waits or additional administrative burdens — can discourage voters from participating in future elections, leading to lower turnout.
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“It’s like going into a restaurant and being treated badly by wait staff,” he said. “You’re not going to want to go to that restaurant, or voting place, again.”
‘Step in right direction’
Bexar County’s 1.3 million registered voters will begin heading to the polls for early voting on Oct. 19. The election is a high-profile one, with a nationally watched Senate race between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, and Democrat James Talarico.
Voters registration and ballot-access advocates are calling for public explanations of ballot problems and better communication from the Elections Department.
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With input from poll workers, Welde compiled a list of 14 concerns about the Elections Department, along with recommendations to improve its performance — including an external audit of its operations and a root-cause analyses of delivery problems and Runbeck’s performance.
The group is also calling for tracking information for ballots after they are mailed, as well as a system for tracking and resolving problems when they arise.
Emily French, policy director for the nonpartisan voting rights organization Common Cause Texas, said that while documenting voter concerns is important for the sake of transparency, election officials are working with limited budgets and staffs, and they’re under intense public scrutiny.
“It’s harder to be an elections official in America than it ever has been before, and they often feel like they have to be on guard,” she said. “They’re trying to balance the massive amount of work they do behind the scenes with transparency and communication with the public.”
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The Elections Department will host its first open house on Oct. 3, giving residents an opportunity to register to vote, update their voter registration information, learn about the election process and explore poll worker opportunities.
Vale called the event a “step in the right direction,” but said it should be part of a broader public education effort. She believes the department should include instructions with every mail ballot explaining how to complete it and reminding voters they must surrender their mail ballot if they later choose to vote in person.
She also wants more public meetings explaining voter registration deadlines, mail-ballot procedures and other election processes. She pointed to the Harris County Elections Department as a model, which has active social media accounts and held at least five voter outreach meetings in September.
“It goes two ways: we need to provide clear information and provide space where the public can get their questions easily answered,” Vale said. “Starting that process the Saturday before the voter registration deadline is not soon enough.”
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French said educating voters on provisional ballots — what they are, how they work, when they’ll count — is particularly important. She said the issues with the DPS portal could increase the number of voters who will be required to vote provisionally.
“Most people who vote provisionally don’t learn about that process until they show up to the polls,” she said. “And most voters — who work one job, two jobs, have kids — don’t have time to research the intricacies of the process.”
For Sybil Morgan, the uncertainty over mail-in ballots has changed how she plans to vote. She’s already decided to vote in person and is encouraging her friends who vote by mail to do the same.
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“It’s a nesting doll of crazy in there right now, and I’ve no evidence they’re trying to fix it,” Morgan said.