The Chron endorses Teneshia Hudspeth for a full term as Harris County Clerk.
Teneshia Hudspeth
As the parent of a young child, Teneshia Hudspeth is familiar with the back-to-school rush for documents, including birth certificates. For families without reliable internet access, that might be more of a challenge than usual. And a trip to the county clerk’s office often means taking off work. So, as Harris County Clerk, Hudspeth helped launch an event in 2021 that let parents and guardians come in on a Saturday to get birth certificates at select offices.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of families who needed this service,” she told the editorial board.
She’s continued the event this year, partnering with local organizations that helped cover the costs of the documents for families that needed it and supplied backpacks. Her office added a service that allows people to order a birth certificate online.
These are the small things that a county clerk’s office can do to improve life and ensure that people are getting their needs met by an office that few residents likely understand well.
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With a full term, Hudspeth will be able to seamlessly continue her efforts to make the office more responsive and accessible to all of Harris County.
Under her watch, the office has digitized thousands of marriage license records, prepared an estate-planning virtual series launching this month, added digital monitors in the courts with information in Spanish and English and overseen upgrades to the annex offices, some of which were begun before her tenure.
Among future plans: an e-certification program, an update to marriage license that will allow couples to add their photographs, and more outreach efforts.
In between is a discussion of the former role that the County Clerk played in running elections. That includes a mention of Stan Stanart, the deservedly former Clerk who is running for his old job and wants to do the election-running thing again. However you judge Stanart as the elected official in charge of elections, know that it was Teneshia Hudspeth doing the real work behind the scenes while he was spending a bunch of money on iPads he never deployed. As the headline indicates, the fact that Stanart is on the ballot just doesn’t stick in my mind – I confront that fact when I do campaign finance roundups, and now as I read this endorsement piece, and in an hour or so it will have flitted right back out of my memory again. This is a happy place for me to be. Please don’t ruin it. Vote for Teneshia Hudspeth, for the betterment of the Clerk’s office and my peace of mind.
You can listen to my interview with Teneshia Hudspeth and hear all the reasons why she is a very fine County Clerk here. On the B-side, the Chron endorsed their first Republican of the cycle, giving the nod to Morgan Luttrell in CD08, a district that unlike some others can reasonably be described as “bright red”. As noted, it is somewhat less crimson now than it was before redistricting, but the voters to shore up Dan Crenshaw and Mike McCaul have to come from somewhere and it’s those “bright red” districts like CD08 that are the obvious source. If you’d prefer an alternative to hoping that Luttrell will “bring more substance with him” when he gets to Congress as the Chron does, you can listen to my interview with his Democratic opponent Laura Jones.