Hays County Commissioners Court Discuss Citizens Election Commission Workings

Staff Reports

The Hays County Commissioners Court held a discussion regarding the workings of the Hays County Citizens Election’s Commission.

A number of committee members were not informed of the meeting and thus were not in attendance, according to officials.

Anita Collins, Judge’s Executive Assistant, said the county judge’s office had taken the imitative to notify committee members of the meeting but experienced technical issues with a mass notification attempt, which could explain why a number of committee members did not receive the meeting notification.

Collins noted that committee members also received only a small sampling of the election data out of the election’s office.

Elections Administrator, Jennifer Anderson, admitted that the sampling of data the commission received did not exemplify the full statistics from the election.

“I was not informed of this meeting,” Anderson said. “I found out about it an hour before it. I was asked to bring this data, so that’s what I could pull together in about an hour’s time.”

Roland Saucedo, interim chair of the Citizen’s Elections Advisory Committee, said there were nine members of the commission as well as four guests in attendance at the first meeting.

Saucedo stated he had requested the Elections Office to handle the notification to commission members of the commission’s next meeting and to include copies of all the data they had provided at the first meeting.

“I too want to ensure that these meetings remain open to the public,” Saucedo said. “And I think whether you’re an elected official or not, you want to come to a meeting as a private citizen, you’re more than welcome to because at the commission meetings we do not have a citizen comment period or a questions and answers session, so there will be no influence to our commission.”

Saucedo continued to say that in the future, the commission’s elected secretary will handle the notifications of commission meetings, and commission members will be required to RSVP to ensure the members received the notification.

Commissioners voted unanimously on a motion to clarify that people who are running for office at a county, state, school or city level cannot serve on “this voluntary committee.”

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One Comment

  1. I am a member of this committee and was not notified of the meeting. I hope that we can be notified in a timely manner in the future.

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