Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson spoke to business leaders in Dallas on Tuesday, detailing the work her office is doing.
Nelson was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in January 2023 and confirmed by the Senate in March. She serves as the state’s 115th Secretary of State after previously serving in the Senate for 30 years. During her last eight years as a senator, Nelson chaired the powerful Finance Committee and led the budget-writing efforts.
On October 3, she spoke to the Metroplex Civic & Business Association, a collection of more than 100 member companies that focus on encouraging local political engagement.
Nelson explained that she had decided to retire from the Senate after unanimously passing her last budget.
“I went to bed that night and woke up the next morning, and I said, you know what, I’m done,” the state secretary said.
“I did my job and I was done. I thought: I’m going to travel the world. I’m going to have fun, and I got rid of my place in Austin,” she added. “That lasted for about two weeks, maybe three, and the governor called me, and he said, ‘Oh no you’re not, I need you to be my secretary of state.’”
As secretary, Nelson has four main goals she is hoping to achieve.
“One of them is we need some consistency here. We need stability,” she said. “We’ve gone through eight secretaries of state in the last 10 years. We can’t do that.”
“Gov. Abbott told me he’d like me to stay a little while, so that’s my first goal,” Nelson continued. “A little bit of stability.”
“The second part of my vision is modernization,” she said, telling a story about the millions of files sitting in the basement that need to be digitized. “We’re going to modernize this stuff. We’re going to get this stuff on a computer. … We’re going to clean this up.”
“My third goal is we’ve got to restore confidence in the election process,” Nelson added.
As secretary of state, she is ultimately responsible for the election despite the fact that local governments have operational control.
“If there are complaints, I can audit them. If I think that there’s been somebody breaking the law and complaints come in, I report it to the attorney general,” she explained. “The legislature, actually, last session, they have some confidence in me, and they gave me a little bit of authority to go in and take a little bit stronger action.”
“There’s one final key mission,” Nelson concluded. “And that is to promote Texas when it comes to economic development and international investment, and that includes a focus on our number one trading partner — Mexico.”
The secretary noted that in August Mexico overtook China as the top trade partner for the United States.
“I know the politics right now of what’s going on at the border, and that’s a whole issue that the governor deals with, and I support the governor’s policies,” she said. “But I deal with the trade issue. We do $208 billion of business with our partner to the south.”
Nelson emphasized that trade relations ought to remain friendly due to food and supply chain concerns.
“It’s important that our border trade policies are done wisely,” she noted.
The situation at the border has become increasingly tense as unlawful migration reaches historic levels, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Referencing the surge of unlawful migrants, Nelson said, “The easy answer is for the federal government to do its job. That’s the answer because it makes it very, very difficult for us to work with our partners in Mexico.”
“The federal government needs to do their job,” she added. “Protect our borders.”