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Join us now as we go on the record with Randy Beamer.

Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us for On the Record this week.

I'm Randy Beamer, and with the elections coming up this week, we're talking elections as well as education.

And maybe to answer some of your questions about the elections themselves, aside from polling and what we can expect and maybe some of the misconceptions that we can get rid of those for you to allay your concerns.

Joining us, first of all, to talk about that is Jackie Callan, a longtime Bexar County elections administrator.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

As we are getting ready for the elections, first of all, what are some of the misconceptions that people have that, you know, concerns about?

What's going to happen with my ballot?

How do I get, you know, are there going to be a lot of mail in ballots or that?

What are some of the biggest concerns questions you're getting from people?

Right now?

I mean, that's a great question because it covers all areas.

Right now the next deadline for us is October 7th, which is the voter registration deadline to be registered 30 days before the actual election.

So we're seeing that and we're having people there's different organizations that are doing mailing.

There's a lot of organizations that are out there helping us.

Mailing out register.

Application.

Mailing out.

Balance.

Yes, sir.

That's only.

One this.

That's the biggest misconception.

So I thank you for that.

So that we can get that word out because, some people are being intimidated.

They see these official letters come election Department election official mail, and they just open it.

And it feels to them that we've sent them a ballot and they didn't ask for it.

And please have everyone understand we will only process a mail ballot application if it's filled out.

And as we call it, a wet signature, it must be an original signature.

And they can mail it in to us and then we'll process it.

They can't do it online.

So don't know.

Isn't that something that.

And that's tough.

That that's as tough as it is for Texas doesn't have any online voter registration.

And so one of the things that we see are, our younger generation, they want to do everything on the computer as, as they should.

You know, makes it a lot easier.

But on the official form from the state, well, you can fill it in on a computer.

You have to get all the way to the bottom of the page.

And there's a nice little button that says print to you.

You.

And they miss that print.

Sometimes they miss it.

They're not registered.

That will not come.

And that's that's a problem.

When they appear at the poll sites.

And other places, they can get and register the applications to register and where they can register or where.

Our main one is DPS when you go for your driver's license.

But I don't think we'll see a whole lot more of that.

Our understanding is that the appointments for that, or will past our deadline now, social agencies, libraries, high school principals are to hand them out and have registered for the 18th soon to be 18.

So there are numerous places and you always can call on us and we will mail one to you.

And how about when does early voting start?

How many locations do you have?

It's coming.

October 21st is the first day of early voting and we have 51 locations.

Now.

We've we've pushed that number way up.

And the hours for early voting.

They're the same.

They they we we expect them to be longer because we do expect to see lines.

But the first week is 8 to 6.

That's our normal time.

For Saturdays it's 8 to 8.

So that we hope we get everybody that's going to those soccer games and Sundays or noon to six.

And the last week is 8 to 8, 12 hours a day.

And the last day for early voting is that Saturday before.

November 1st November.

It's Friday.

Friday.

Before it closes Friday night.

Yes, sir.

And also the the applications for Mail-In ballot ballots are when that's a different day.

That the mail in ballot deadline for us to receive it in so office.

It must be in our office on by 5:00 on October 25th.

That's the mail in ballot.

That's the mail.

That's all you have.

You expect a whole lot more people voting this time than in any past election?

Yes.

I mean, it's hard.

To tell.

Exactly.

Those crystal balls usually are very cloudy at this point.

And, we always our planning is always to match the last like, election.

So of course we had 2020 and we know that was in the pandemic.

That was in Covid.

So for us we had 121,000.

Mail ballot applications.

Wow.

And now, in terms of some places across the country, there has been concern over the last number of years about getting enough volunteers to to man the voting locations.

Is that an issue here in Bexar County?

No, sir, it is not.

The parties have worked diligently for it.

And, most of our officials are civic minded.

We have such a group of people who have stuck with us.

And as we say, they would work if they weren't compensated or paid.

It's just an issue of pride for them.

And it's.

And that's our base, that's our foundation.

And then as we get other people to join us, we try and pair them up with one of our seasoned, election officials.

And you as other administrators across the country, elections administrators have, had pushback and criticism of all different kinds.

Some elections administrators like up in Fredericksburg, that whole office quit.

Because of all kinds of different concerns.

And you had concerns in the past about, complaints in the past about the number of early voting locations.

That's not an issue this time.

No, sir.

And, also, there have been different concerns across the country that people might worry about here, like hand counts, that George have just voted for their election, whatever the state level is.

We don't have hand counts here because.

Historically.

And data tells us that it's not as accurate, and the length of time that it takes is inordinately long.

Again, if for a hand counting here when when we have been approached other or, you know, want that organizational and when we put a time to it and we look at if you step back the law requires that if you're doing hand count ballots, you have to stay at your poll site.

The judges and the people that have worked already 13, 14 hours, then they have to start counting and they are not permitted, allowed the law to leave that poll site until it's completed.

And so you see, some people do their 20 hours, they get in 26 hours, you know, and that's brutal.

I'm sorry.

And the, the technology is reliable, has been reliable.

It is checked.

And so you don't have any concerns about that.

Some people have questioned that.

And finally, how about, some of the other things that people have wanted to know about in the past?

Now, I know you've you brought in, both Republican and Democratic county chairs as as well as others after one of the elections to show them this is how we do it.

This is who does that.

This is why we do it the way we do.

Right.

And you haven't had those concerns really since then, have you, in terms of from the political parties?

They're astute.

They're watching.

But again, I'm just so impressed by my staff and the things that we do that the people need to be confident in the equipment.

Number one, that usually where the most questions come from.

And every year we have a preventive maintenance for two weeks.

The Coca-Cola company comes in, like if you take your car in for maintenance and it gets a full look at, but this year we did one.

We went one more step because we've had our equipment for five years.

With the paper that you put into, you have our paper receipt.

We've replaced all of the batteries in every piece of equipment.

So we just finished a month of that.

So again, trying to be proactive.

It's it's done.

People could see the checks and balances we have.

And people may have realized that you are or heard that you are retiring after this election in January.

How do you feel about that?

And are you ready for that after all of the, elections and ministrations going through all the issues that they've had across the country?

Thank you for asking.

Yes, it's mixed feelings.

I it's been the best part of these last years.

Have been the amazing people that I've gotten to interact with.

As you just heard me say, those election officials, they they mean the world to us.

And they want to do everything in their power to make every voter that walks in there feel welcome, not intimidated.

But then after 19 years and again, you heard me say how many hours it takes.

If you're doing a hand count on presidential election, we think we'll leave, like at 3:00 in the morning.

That's a long day.

Yes.

So that's been a long days.

Will be, A long career as well.

Yes, sir.

Well, thank you very much for coming in.

Look forward to a free and fair election and maybe no headaches and maybe finding out the results within just a few hours, I would.

I'm sorry.

I would love to do that in our office.

The motto is that when we have any election, the goal is that when we print our final report for the night, that it still has the date of the election.

On that report.

And that's that's our goal.

So November 5th sometime, we hope yet.

But yeah, we hope, we hope.

All right.

Well good luck with all of that.

Jackie Callan and long time Bexar County elections administrator.

Thanks for coming.

In.

Thank you sir.

Appreciate it.

And now, just about five weeks out from the election, we are getting some polling results from UTSA is new center for Public Opinion Research.

All kinds of polling results, not just in the presidential race but in the city races as well.

Here to talk about that.

How they got these results is the director for the UTSA center for Public Opinion Research, doctor Brian Gervais.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, I was going to say it was about a year ago.

You came in and you talked about what was being planned for this whole new part of UTSA and how is it going since since then.

It's going really well.

As you mentioned, we've had three, election related polls in the field so far, one in March around Super Tuesday, a foundational poll in June, and then we've had our most recent poll in September, which we timed, to be in the field after the second presidential debate, the first beat between, Harris and Trump.

And we've also started working with some other polling projects, building up a panel, which we call our Bexar County panel, which we're going to be using to do lots of different types of research, into the concerns and the issues of Bexar County voters and San Antonio residents.

And that's what you talked about in your foundational thing.

You just you're working on, as well as political polling.

What San Antonio's are concerned about in general.

So it might help, local leaders down the road identify those concerns and deal with them.

Absolutely.

That's the idea.

You know, there has been a lack of public information, public polling in San Antonio for some time, and we see these sort of, centers and these sort of projects in other cities and major cities, including Houston.

Right.

Houston has the Kinder Institute that does a Houston community poll.

There really provides lots of information about policy concerns and issues that, Harris County residents, want to express.

And this leads to actionable, policy changes at times.

And it's information is useful for organizations that are involved in advocacy groups as well in government institutions.

So we want to provide that same service for San Antonio and Bexar County that we see in other major cities.

And that will track things going up and down in terms of interest before we get to the political results, which are interesting as well.

What are some of those concerns right now, and have you seen any changes in those first two poll?

Well, we did initial, look at just some of the major concerns of, San Antonio and Bexar County voters.

In our first poll.

And we're going to do some follow ups to some of our panelists, coming up in our first panel poll this fall.

But we do see a distinction between people's major concerns or major issues between the federal, state and local level.

And I think that's really interesting that people do discern a difference between the different levels of government.

And this sort of dovetails with some of the findings.

We've seen them are polls that people generally give, they're much more trusting, and they give higher approval, to leaders and government institutions at the local level.

They overall trust the local level more, they think that the what's happening in the local communities going in the right direction to a greater extent than what they think they see happening at the state and federal level.

And I think that is really fascinating, very interesting, and tells us a little bit about what we're doing right in San Antonio and opens, doors to even improving, you know, what we're doing in our community.

So incumbents at a local level, maybe state level, are more likely to be reelected or get a higher percentage of the vote generally than at national level.

Certainly.

I think, you know, Mayor Ron Nuremburg, for example, is, has higher approval numbers, among Bexar County voters, our other San Antonio voters and Bexar County residents in general, than, let's say, Governor Abbott and President Biden.

At this point.

And speaking of okay, so we'll go from there.

Yeah.

Ron Nuremberg is leaving office.

There is going to be a mayoral race.

And you pulled on that.

And what's the result?

Well, it's very early on, but roughly 70% of San Antonio residents, that we polled, aren't sure how they're going to vote at this point.

We don't know.

Who they don't know who the candidates are.

They haven't thought about it.

They don't know at this point in time.

So we're a long way away from me, right?

There's a lot to change.

And, I, I'm sure that we'll see some consolidation and we'll see candidates making inroads once the campaigns, really kicks up.

Right.

We've got a, you know, we've got a handful of candidates who have declared so far.

And that's for the May election in the city.

But there are some city issues.

City charter amendments coming up in November will vote on.

Yeah.

What are the results for that?

So one big thing is that 80% of our, of our respondents haven't even heard about any of these charter amendments so far.

And that's something we saw.

You know, that number has unchanged from our June poll as well.

So one thing to keep in mind, some important contacts of 80% aren't sure or have even heard of them yet.

A lot can change.

And so that's how I would contextualize our results.

First of all, is that this is a four cast, and like a weather forecast, right?

Two weeks out, conditions can change, right?

But as of right now, we see at least a few amendments, a couple amendments, appear to be in trouble.

And those are the amendments where they will for paying more for city council and mayor, as well as changing the term limits.

Right.

And, and so, the proposed amendment that appears to be in the worst shape at this point in time, is the idea that we remove the caps on the city manager, both in terms of salary and length of office, that were established in 2018, through a pair of amendments at the ballot as well.

So, you know, voters will be voting on the six amendments of six amendments that we pulled on, come November.

They will be on the ballot when you go to cast a vote for president and for US Senate and all the other races.

These initiatives will be on there.

And so, you know, I hope that our, our results to some extent encourage people to learn about the science, read about these.

Things, and to that will have a lot more ads.

Okay.

Now moving on to, some of the other local races, Democratic candidates doing better than, Republican candidates in general.

Bexar County has been blue for a while, and also nationally as well.

What kind of results overall?

Yeah.

So we see a surge in support for Democrat candidates, namely president, U.S. Senate race and for, for House races between our June and September poll.

In some ways and numbers sort of return to what we've seen in 2020.

We see that Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump among Bexar County voters, by a little over 18 percentage points in our poll.

And that is almost identical to the deficit or the difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Bexar County in 2020.

Actual voting.

And now the June, in September, that was in the middle was when Kamala Harris, became a candidate.

So that you think has has provided a lot of encouragement.

Yeah.

So our June poll.

Right.

Joe Biden is still the presumed nominee at this point.

And the difference between, Biden and Trump and our June poll wasn't all that large.

And we see a surge, at least, support for the Democratic nominee.

Between June and September.

You know, Donald Trump's numbers are relatively unchanged.

We don't really see his support dwindling or increasing all that much, but we do see that lots of folks that were sort of undecided didn't know how they were vote or would even vote for a, you know, a third party candidate.

Lots of that support seems to have gone to Harris in the interim.

Colin Allred, Ted Cruz in the Senate race.

Yep.

Same sort of story there where the the gap between all Red and Cruz wasn't all that big, all red Ted Cruz in June, but we see it increasing.

Not to the same extent that we see Harris increasing on Biden and, from June.

But we do see all race numbers improve between June and September as well.

And so down ballot in terms of, Democrat, Republican, that also increased maybe to the same level.

Across which we asked folks about, you know, who would they would vote for, for House candidates, Democrat or Republican in their district.

And again, we see an increase in support for the Democratic candidate between June and September.

And and how did you get some of these results?

Getting back to the UTSA part, you have people who, go to UTSA but are getting paid to be, polars, if that's the term.

We do that for some of our polls.

For this particular poll, this was an online poll.

And the way we put together our sample is that we use a voter file, that has vote history of every single registered voter in Bexar County, not how they voted, but at least what elections they've participated in.

In public and in Democratic primaries.

Right.

But we're focused on the general election right now, so we can see how people have voted in past general elections, and we can put voters into different categories based on that past history.

And what we do is we randomly sample from within these different categories based on likelihood of voting and past voting history, to put together a sample that's meant to look like a general electorate in Bexar County.

Well, it's going to be interesting to see how accurate all the polls are right now.

And you're plus 3.7 plus or -3.7.

Margin of error.

So we'll hold.

You.

All right.

Well thank you very much, doctor Brian, survey director of the UTSA center for Public Opinion Research.

Thanks for coming in.

And thanks so much for having me.

There are several stories that touch on education you may have noticed in the news recently.

One of those also touches on what will happen with plans for a baseball stadium in the northwestern part of downtown.

Here to talk about all of that and then who knows everything there is to know about education stories.

Education reporter for the San Antonio Report, Isaac Wines.

Thanks very much for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

All right.

Now, first of all, the story, the last hurdle, it looks like to plans to at least alert Major League Baseball that the missions are ready to build a new stadium.

Downtown is one plot of land owned by the San Antonio Independent School District.

That is right now a parking lot.

Where are we in in this process of whether that will be okay?

That sale will be okayed for sure.

That's right.

It's a dirt parking lot that currently has, several of the the schools that are located at the Fox, Texas, Kent, Fox Tech campus.

That's where they all park is, at issue here.

And, it came up during a recent school board meeting.

It was on the agenda.

Several of the, residents of one of the apartment complexes that would have to be demolished for this project to move forward.

So the soap factory apartments showed up at that meeting to speak out and asked the district to, stop this, essentially.

And, board members during the meeting said that they were not going to make any decisions before they heard from the residents.

And so that's pretty much all that happened at that meeting.

They spoke about it during the executive closed part of the session.

But, they are going to hold a community meeting on October 7th.

The details haven't been released yet, but on October 7th, I've been told, is when they're going to hold a community meeting before they make any sort of a decision.

In the baseball stadium, I should say, is just one part of this much larger development, West and Urban and others of backers.

But for the baseball stadium part, they need to have this letter to MLB by the mid-October.

So it's very it's kind of up to the deadline here.

Do we know what the timeline is for Sisd right now?

And no, we don't know at this point.

They haven't said when they're going to vote on it.

But yes, that is a very tight deadline between when they're getting the feedback and when they would have to make a decision to meet that deadline given by the MLB.

And so factory and others and people who are against this, in the downtown area, they have pushed for the city to be against the push for the county.

County is going to vote expected to vote for this plan, that the soap factory residents will be getting some help and getting other apartments and things like that.

That's the other side of the argument.

So this is the literally last piece.

And so everybody who's been against it is going to show up at the board meeting.

I think potentially, yes.

I think that that is definitely one of the possibilities.

And they're really leaning on the, very emotional school closure process that happened over this last year.

And, the school district did a study through that process that showed that a lack of affordable housing is part of what led to their enrollment declines, which is why they were they were closing schools.

And so, the San Antonio Alliance, and others are kind of making the point that, you know, closing those apartments could lead to more of those problems and, you know, more declines in enrollment.

And one other story I wanted to get to briefly, at least, that you reported on is the South San School Board's ongoing drama and whether it will be taken over by the Texas Education Agency.

Where are we in that?

That's right.

About a year ago, the Texas Education Agency actually closed three investigations by saying that they did recommend a board of managers appointed by the state to replace the elected board of trustees.

But in the interest of time, they said, we're not going to do that.

We're going to give you a year to get, you know, yourself together, and we're going to put a conservator instead.

So a conservator has the power to direct the board to take action, struck the superintendent.

And, we're at that year mark now.

And the conservator has said he doesn't know exactly what the teacher is going to do.

The board has made a lot of progress, in his view, and in a lot of the things that, you know, they were under investigation for in the first place.

They go ahead.

The CliffsNotes version of that, for sure.

And so, yeah, we will we'll we're waiting to see what the what the DEA is going to do here, in the next week.

Or so, which is kind of deja vu.

And so off and on, that district has been investigated for decades, for sure.

Well, good luck with all that and more that you've been covering.

You can find out more about Isaac Wines and what he's been working on in the San Antonio Report.

Thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

And thank you for joining us for this edition of On the Record.

You can see this show again.

You can watch any previous shows.

You can also download the podcast.

Just go to klrn.org I'm Randy Beamer and we'll see you next time.

On the record is brought to you by Steve and Adele Dufilh