Texas Public Radio reported<\/a>. In that election, voters will cast ballots in several school board races and choose leaders in 14 area municipalities. No San Antonio races are on the ballot.<\/p>\nThis is a welcome improvement over the district\u2019s past practice of refusing to share the May ballot with the city of San Antonio, where many students live. Instead, the district held its elections with the small city of Lytle in Atascosa County.<\/p>\n
That meant until now, voters who are San Antonio residents and live in Southwest\u00a0ISD\u2019s territory\u00a0had to cast ballots in separate locations in order to participate in both entities\u2019 elections. It was a blatant maneuver, albeit legal, to reduce voter turnout.<\/p>\n
Now that San Antonio has moved its elections to November in the hopes of higher turnout, Southwest ISD has joined the Bexar County-wide ballot for May. Four candidates\u00a0\u2014 Pete \u201cPedro\u201d\u00a0Bernal, James Gonzalez, Jose \u201cJoe\u201d Diaz and Yolanda Garza-Lopez \u2014 are vying for two seats on the school board in an at-large election.<\/p>\n
The good news is the move will make voting easier and, hopefully, increase turnout. And yet if the district really wanted to improve turnout, it would have tethered itself to a November election with the city of San Antonio. May elections were already low-turnout affairs, and they will be even more so without the city of San Antonio on the ballot.<\/p>\n
Southwest ISD officials have long argued they want to guard against unqualified voters, but what they are really saying is they want to choose their voters, and guard against transparency and public oversight.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In that light, while this change marks one small step for the district, it is hardly a giant leap forward for voting rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If Southwest Independent School District leaders were interested in engaging with the most voters possible, they would have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":230017,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[88931,45912,88932,88930,82,84,83],"class_list":{"0":"post-230016","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-ededucation","9":"tag-edelection26","10":"tag-edsouthwestisd","11":"tag-edstaff","12":"tag-san-antonio","13":"tag-san-antonio-headlines","14":"tag-san-antonio-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230016","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=230016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/230017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}