{"id":168550,"date":"2026-02-17T20:05:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T20:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/168550\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T20:05:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T20:05:08","slug":"bexar-county-moves-voter-registration-vendors-for-2026-midterm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/168550\/","title":{"rendered":"Bexar County moves voter registration vendors for 2026 midterm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Forced to choose between a new paid voter registration system or a free state program that\u2019s been faulty, Bexar County Commissioners voted Tuesday to move to a new private vendor for the 2026 midterm election.<\/p>\n

The contract totals roughly $2 million<\/a> for a voter registration and elections management system software package.<\/p>\n

Like other large counties, the Bexar County Elections Department was thrust into chaos last summer when its longtime voter registration\u00a0vendor, Votec, went under.<\/p>\n

They had to quickly onboard to a free state system, known as TEAM, at the same time that system was\u00a0undergoing a massive update<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The result was a massive backlog of voter registrations<\/a> that the county had to hire temporary staff to manually enter in the days before early voting for the state\u2019s November constitutional amendment election.<\/p>\n

A similar backlog occurred in the lead up to the March 3 primary and was also resolved in the nick of time. However, voter registration cards \u2014 one of the many forms of identification<\/a> people can use when they go to vote \u2014 have still not been delivered<\/a> due to the delay.<\/p>\n

Under pressure to resolve the issues, this week county leaders forewent the traditional request for qualifications process to purchase services from a new vendor, VR Systems<\/a>. <\/p>\n

VR Systems is now the vendor of choice for a number of other large Texas urban centers, including Tarrant, Denton, Collin and El Paso counties. <\/p>\n

One of its executives even attended a January meeting of the Commissioners Court<\/a> to complain that Bexar County was causing unnecessary delays in the contracting process.<\/p>\n

But county leaders said they were being extra cautious to ensure that VR Systems would truly provide better services than the free state system once the TEAM System update is fully functional.<\/p>\n

Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3), the court\u2019s lone Republican, remains one of the new system\u2019s biggest critics \u2014 arguing Tuesday that the county didn\u2019t need to hasten its normal contracting process for an election still months away.<\/p>\n

While VR Systems won\u2019t be up and running in time for the March primary or May primary runoff, Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew said it will be used for the 2026 midterm election in November. <\/p>\n

She stressed the need for a system that could move applications faster, as well as give local election officials control over the reports and data input process.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have ballot-by-mail applications that have come into our office, we\u2019re about 20,000 in [for the primary], it takes us seven to 10 minutes per application to just get it into their system,\u201d she said. \u201cNot only that, other counties are reporting that some of the data that they\u2019re inputting into there is getting wiped out.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forced to choose between a new paid voter registration system or a free state program that\u2019s been faulty,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[8519,8905,5533,82,84,83,92,3028,2279,68322],"class_list":{"0":"post-168550","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-2026-election","9":"tag-bexar-county-election","10":"tag-michele-carew","11":"tag-san-antonio","12":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","13":"tag-san-antonio-news","14":"tag-top-story","15":"tag-typedaily","16":"tag-voting","17":"tag-vr-systems"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}