Bexar County court approves purchase of voter-registration system after debate over state 'Teams' rollout

Bexar County Commissioners Court voted 09/02/2025 to authorize acquisition of a county voter-registration (VR) system and related hardware to support the Bexar County Elections Department.

The motion to purchase the VR system, moved by Commissioner Pat Calvert and seconded by Commissioner Clay Flores, passed after a divided discussion in which Commissioner Paul Moody argued the county should wait for the Texas Secretary of State's Teams system to be fully deployed.

Calvert said the Elections Department had a backlog of registrations that required immediate attention. "We have 34,200 plus photo registrations that we are behind because the secretary of state hasn't been able to get us online with their system," Calvert said during the court discussion. He said the county had previously budgeted for election systems and that the local acquisition would preserve access to stored registration data and speed local tasks such as mail-ballot signature review.

Moody said the statewide Teams rollout is proceeding and that many Texas counties are moving to Teams. "To me, it just makes sense that we would wait until we actually know whether Teams is and the new functionality is going to be a solution for us or not, before we go spend $2,000,000 on a new system," Moody said and moved to table the item; that motion failed.

Michelle Carreo, Bexar County Elections Administrator, and county staff participated in executive-session briefings and answered questions in open session. Court members who supported the purchase said the county needed redundancy and local control to avoid further delays in processing voter registrations ahead of future elections. Judge Peter Sakai called the final vote after discussion.

The court-record transcript does not include a roll-call tally by name for the final vote; the clerk recorded the motion as carried.