CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The Nueces County Elections office will not be overseeing the May bond election over in Calallen. Instead, San Patricio County elections officials will be running things -- even though Calallen is part of Nueces County.
Calallen Independent School District Superintendent Emily Lorenz said that San Patricio County will act as the helping hand in making sure the election runs smoothly.
"We are working with San Patricio County. They’re going to be the organization that’s helping to run our election," she said.
Nueces County Clerk Kara Sands said that the reasoning is because county voting machines are going to be retrofitted with equipment that will produce a paper ballot so they can be stored.
State lawmakers passed the mandate to prevent cheating at the polls.
"We love to do elections, but unfortunately we let all of the entities know beforehand that we just couldn’t for the May election, because we’re getting ready for the constitutional election in November. So, we aren’t even going to have equipment," she said.
Nueces County Commissioner Joe Gonzalez said they have been looking at several different voting machines. The total cost of the upgrades is believed to be somewhere between two-to-three million dollars.
"Hopefully, in the next month or so, maybe they’ll get something that’s going to work. We saw the machines and we tested a couple of them,” he said
Sands said she recommended that Calallen use San Patricio to run its elections, and said that she doesn’t expect voters to notice any differences.