5 EV Days to Go

A Happy Birthday today to State Sen. Carol Alvarado! A great public servant, elected official, and Democrat. Plus, a super best friend.

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H-Town Mayor John Whitmire spoke at a State Rep. James Talarico event last week. Didn’t surprise me. Let me remind folks that one of the mayor’s last official acts as a state senator was voting to convict cheating, crooked Ken Paxton at Paxton’s impeachment trial in 2023.

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A few days ago, MAGA Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick made a plea to rural Republican voters to turnout to vote, or else Democrats will win. It was a tacit admission that Patrick and MAGA policies have been fu_king over urban voters, and urban voters have had it. Just saying.

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Scott Braddock tweeted this past weekend:

Houston: Hundreds of Texans leaving their “I voted” stickers at the site where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot by ICE

Absolutely amazing. It is real.

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Remember when that blowhard MAGA buffoon State Sen. Paul Bettencourt passed legislation telling Harris County how to conduct elections. Maybe this jerk should have looked at the state. See this from the Chron:

Counties across Texas have reported record-breaking turnout during the first week of early voting, including tens of thousands of mail-in ballots. But as of Friday, the totals on the state’s election website didn’t match many of those being touted by local officials. 

In Bexar County, for instance, only eight people voted by mail, according to the state’s site. In reality, according to Michele Carew, the county’s election administrator, nearly 18,000 people have cast ballots by mail. 

“We do not leave this office until we report numbers to the state,” she said. 

The state’s turnout data continues to lag significantly for many large urban counties, especially for mail-in ballots, an error that local election officials say is linked to the same flawed system that caused a massive backlog of voter registrations in recent weeks. 

In person vote totals have also lagged. Election officials in Fort Bend County – one of the state’s most competitive districts – reported more than 75,000 ballots cast in person as of Friday morning while the state’s website shows just over 41,000.

Local election officials said they are still confident in the state’s election night reporting system, which functioned without any issues or delay in the March primary, but are frustrated the turnout numbers aren’t being accurately reported.

“It’s not that we haven’t entered the data, it’s just not reflecting here,” said Kristin Miles, the election administrator in Bastrop County and the president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, referring to the Secretary of State’s portal. 

Local elections officials have said the problem lies with the state’s online voter system, Texas Election Administration Management (TEAM), which was was overhauled in July 2025. 

In February, they wrote to Jane Nelson, then the Secretary of State, noting that “counties face daily challenges with TEAM’s core functionality.”

Earlier this month, election officials scrambled to update a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations that had languished due to a separate issue at the Department of Public Safety. The glitch-prone TEAM system made all those registrations harder to update, said Sam Taylor, public affairs director for the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

“There’s a common denominator here and it’s the rollout of the new TEAM system,”  he said. 

Leading up to the election, county officials were told they’d be able to input mail voter rolls in bulk. On Tuesday, Christina Adkins, the Secretary of State’s director of elections, sent an email to election administrators instructing them to manually enter mail voter data into the TEAM system, one by one. 

“We have determined that with the [sic] functionality related to mail ballots is not ready for use in this election,” Adkins wrote. “We recognize the additional workload this places on counties.” 

Entering ballots one-by-one is “extremely burdensome to counties,” Miles said. She said updating individual voter records can take from 30 seconds “on a good day” to upwards of 10 minutes each. 

In Bastrop County, Miles said the TEAM system incorrectly recorded ballots received by mail this week or last as cast on Nov. 3. The county has had to update each record individually to reflect the date actually received. 

“The state’s saying, well, you need to go in and manually fix them,” she said. “And as a county election official, I’m saying, we don’t have the time for that, right?” 

Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State, said on Thursday that counties are responsible for uploading their data into the state system and it isn’t unusual to see some delays from the previous day. She said counties are supposed to have their data entered by 11 a.m. the next day, but some have been slower to get information in.

“This is the nature of trying to combine and report on 254 counties,” Pierce said. 

Pierce did not respond to a request for comment on Friday when asked about the specific TEAM issue flagged by county officials.

In interim hearings this summer, lawmakers grilled Adkins over the state’s handling of the TEAM overhaul, and in particular its oversight of Civix, the vendor selected to handle the state’s voter registration system. 

“When I get half a dozen counties with their hair on fire … it means that the vendor is behind on actually delivering fixes to the system,” state Sen. Paul Bettencourt said at a June hearing. “And those fixes have to be done because if we go into a November election and we can’t claim that we have integrity in the voter roll, we’re gonna have questions.” 

Carew said this week that she didn’t think the TEAM issue would impact election night, though she acknowledged that “it’s impacting voter confidence.” She noted that the county had a plan in place for reporting vote totals on Nov. 3.

Clown show for sure. This is beyond nauseating. Keep an eye on this as election day approaches.

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This is it. We are getting there. 5 EV days to go. The final early voting in person week of 2026. Let’s hope Texas voters have had enough of the MAGA corruption from the featured photo.

Vote, vote, vote! Early, early, early!