Two candidates for District Clerk are running on the backlog. The DA said it was gone in March.

Two candidates for Harris County District Clerk are both campaigning on reducing backlogs, six months after the district attorney announced the county’s criminal case backlog was eliminated. Neither candidate was asked for a number, and neither gave one.

Why it matters

The District Clerk runs the filings, the public records and the jury system for a county of 4.8 million people. Voters choosing between two candidates on November 3 are being asked to judge a management job entirely on adjectives, in the one courthouse office whose performance is measurable in days and case counts.

By the numbers

Average pending felony cases per Harris County court, per the DA’s office: 904 in March 2016, 2,384 at the 2021 peak, 728 in March 2026. By our arithmetic that is 69 percent below the peak and 19 percent below the pre-Harvey figure.
Harris County cases disposed in 2025 that ended in dismissal, per ABC13’s analysis: 64 percent. Of those dismissals, 25 percent were attributed to insufficient evidence by the DA’s office, which works out to about 16 percent of everything disposed.
Cases resolved in under a year: 83 percent. The rest, which ABC13 describes as thousands of cases, still runs past twelve months.
County jail population, February 2026: 8,513, against 9,680 a year earlier, a drop of 12 percent.
Commissioners Court funding aimed at the backlog in 2025: $7.5 million.
Election day: November 3, 2026. Early voting runs October 19 to 30.

What the coverage buried

Two problems, in two different stories. The Community Impact questionnaire asked Chris Daniel, a two-term former District Clerk, and Darrell Jordan Jr., a former judge, what they would fix. Both answered in process language: publish turnaround times, modernize technology, establish performance measures, reduce backlogs. The article carries no current figure for filing turnaround, records processing or jury yield, and no follow-up asking either man what the number is today. A reader finishes it unable to tell which candidate is closer to right.

The backlog coverage has the opposite problem. FOX 26 ran the district attorney’s announcement with the 904, 2,384 and 728 figures and no skeptical line. ABC13 published the same day with its own analysis showing 64 percent of 2025 dispositions ended in dismissal, a quarter of those because the DA’s office said the evidence was insufficient. A case count falls when cases are tried and when cases are dropped. Only one is the achievement the announcement described, and the story carrying the celebratory number did not mention the other.

The other side

The DA’s numbers are real and the improvement is large. Going from 2,384 pending felonies per court to 728 is not a rounding trick, and it is below where the county sat before Harvey and COVID stacked the dockets. The jail population and the 30-day drop in time in custody point the same way, and defendants held pretrial on cases that will never be tried are who a backlog hurts most. A high dismissal rate is not automatically damning either: clearing weak cases is part of the job.

The answer is that every one of those figures comes from the office being graded. The 904, 2,384 and 728 numbers appear identically in FOX 26 and CW39 because both relay the same DA press release, which cites “newly released data” it does not publish. That is one source, not three. Until that data is posted or matched against the Office of Court Administration’s filings, the correct description is that the district attorney says the backlog is gone, not that records show it.

What to watch

Whether either District Clerk candidate publishes a current filing turnaround time before October 19, when early voting starts.
Whether the DA’s office releases the case-level data behind the 728 figure, or whether it stays a press release number.
The 2027 county budget vote this month, which funds the courts, the DA and the clerk. The $7.5 million backlog appropriation was a 2025 decision that has to be renewed or dropped.
Whether the dismissal share for 2026 dispositions lands above or below the 64 percent ABC13 found for 2025.

Bottom line

Harris County’s criminal case numbers have improved substantially, and the people saying so are the people responsible for them. The District Clerk race is the one place voters could force a number onto the table this fall, and the coverage has so far let both candidates campaign on the word “backlog” without printing one.