Bexar County wants to hire outside vendor to register voters

SAN ANTONIO – According to San Antonio Report, several of Texas’ large urban counties have a new plan to boost voter participation ahead of the 2024 presidential election: hiring an outside company to find and register new voters. It’s the latest chapter in the ongoing battle between counties that want to make voting easier and a state with a Republican-led legislature pushing in the opposite direction. On Tuesday, Bexar County Commissioners voted 4-1 in favor of asking county staff to find roughly $600,000 for a subscription to Civic Government Solutions (CGS), which keeps a database of unregistered voters, tracks voters as they move from other places and mails out prefilled voter registration forms with prepaid return envelopes. It’s the type of work normally done by nonprofit groups, political parties and individual campaigns, which target likely supporters based on their voting history or other data they’ve collected.

CGS, on the other hand, says it targets all potentially eligible voters and uses a “proprietary database” to identify people who wouldn’t normally appear in commercial voter files. “We send each potential voter in your universe customized persuasive messaging and state-specific instructions,” the company’s website says. When people receive that information along with the prefilled form and envelope, it says, “this combination of materials has proven to maximize returns.” Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2), who brought the idea forward, said he learned about it from Harris County, which voted in April to pursue a roughly $1 million voter registration effort with CGS. Travis County Commissioners voted to hire CGS at the beginning of 2024 and could spend up to $500,000 for its services this year. Dallas County has been in talks with the company as well, according to CSG. “This is not, from my perspective, a Democrat or Republican agenda item,” Rodriguez told the San Antonio Report. “It’s how do we get more people civically engaged? How do we make it easier for them?” But the move is already drawing complaints from some local Republicans who’ve balked at the idea of using public funds to boost voter turnout in a Democratic stronghold.