Early voting starts Monday for the runoff in an Alamo Colleges trustee race — but the polling locations posted weeks ago have changed again, this time at the last minute.
A four-way race for the board’s District 9 seat advanced to a runoff between accountant Robert Garcia and longtime educator Carolyn DeLecour because but no candidate took the 50% support required to win outright in May.
It’s the only race on the ballot on June 13, and only voters who live in Alamo Colleges’ single-member District 9 can participate.
That means low turnout was already expected, even before the late changes.
“Having pulled Encino and Tobin libraries — those are top voting locations,” Garcia said on Thursday. “I know there’s a lot of elections, but we should have been prepared to have those locations available to us, and we weren’t.”
DeLecour said Thursday afternoon that she’d also just been notified of the latest changes and was scrambling to correct her campaign materials.
“We’ve given our voters some of the wrong info, and so now we’re trying to recoup and recover, and make sure that they get the information that they need,” DeLecour said. “It’s just unfortunate that the elections people couldn’t sort it out. We’re three days from early voting.”
Early voting runs June 1-9, and voters can now choose from three polling centers: San Antonio College’s Victory Center, Northeast Lakeview College and Hope Church. Hours vary by day.
The same locations will be open again from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on election day, Saturday, June 13.
Originally, Alamo Colleges expected to have four voting locations for this election, including two Northside libraries that are among the most heavily trafficked polling centers in the county.
First the libraries were swapped out due to summer reading events, said Elections Administrator Michele Carew.
Then on Tuesday, one of the substitute locations, Morgan’s Wonderland, alerted her that it would also be unavailable.
“Once we were informed, we updated [the Alamo Community Colleges District] and updated the posted voting locations online,” Carew said.
Read more about the candidates in the San Antonio Report’s Alamo Colleges Runoff Voter Guide
Garcia, who lives on the Northern edge of the district, said it wasn’t fair to cut a location that makes it harder for people in one geographic area of the district to vote.
“It’s frustrating because we already have a low voter turnout,” Garcia said. “Now we’re decreasing the polls, and we’re literally disenfranchising voters.”
DeLecour agreed, saying the last-minute poll closure “will only make it more difficult for people to get to the three locations that are left.”
It’s unclear how many voters might turn out to a June runoff with just one race on the ballot.
In 2020, the District 9 seat went to a runoff between then-incumbent Joe Jesse Sanchez and then-challenger Leslie Sachanowicz, but the board was still holding its elections in November at that point.
Alamo Colleges board seats were the only races on the Dec. 12 runoff ballot that year, and a total of roughly 4,500 ballots were cast in District 9, where Sachanowicz wound up winning by 66 votes.
Interest in the first round of this year’s municipal election was already abysmal.
With about 5,300 total votes cast, Garcia and DeLecour finished just six votes apart.
This story first appeared in the San Antonio Report.