Texans who got used to a lengthy ballot measure section last fall won't find one this November. Voters who show up to their county's polling place on Nov. 3 will vote on candidates — governor, other statewide offices, legislative and congressional seats, and local races — but won't see any statewide constitutional amendments, because none were referred to the ballot for this cycle. That's a straightforward function of how Texas's constitutional structure works, not a sign that lawmakers ran out of things to propose.
Article XVII of the Texas Constitution requires that any amendment first pass both chambers of the Legislature by a two-thirds vote before it can go to voters. The Texas Legislature holds regular sessions only in odd-numbered years — 2025, 2027, 2029, and so on — meeting for roughly 140 days starting in January. In 2026, an even-numbered year, there is no regular session, and while the governor can call a special session at any time for a specific purpose, none of this year's special sessions produced a new constitutional amendment for the ballot. That pattern is overwhelmingly the norm rather than the exception: of the 193 statewide ballot measures Texas voters decided between 1995 and 2023, 189 — nearly 98% — appeared on odd-year ballots, precisely because that's when the Legislature is in regular session and able to pass the joint resolutions amendments require.
Last November's ballot was an unusually large one by that historical standard. Texas voters decided 17 proposed constitutional amendments on Nov. 4, 2025 — the most since 2003 — and approved all of them, most by comfortable margins above 60%. More than half of the 17 amendments dealt directly with property taxes, reflecting a legislative session that made tax relief its signature domestic priority. The two most consequential: Proposition 13, which raised the general homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000 for all homeowners, and Proposition 11, which added a further $60,000 exemption specifically for senior citizens and Texans with disabilities. Voters also approved Proposition 8, which permanently bars the Legislature from ever creating a state inheritance or estate tax even though Texas doesn't currently have one, along with amendments directing new funding toward the state's technical college network and dementia and Alzheimer's research.
For conservative voters who track property tax relief closely, last year's results matter well beyond a single election cycle — homestead exemption levels set in the constitution can't be quietly rolled back by a future legislature without going through the same two-thirds vote and statewide referendum process again. That's precisely the point of putting tax relief in the constitution rather than in ordinary statute: it raises the bar for reversing it. With no amendments on this year's ballot, that protection simply carries forward unchanged into 2026 and beyond.
Texans who want a say on the next round of constitutional questions will have to wait for the Legislature's 2027 regular session, when lawmakers will decide which proposals — on taxes, judicial administration, water infrastructure, or other topics — clear the two-thirds threshold needed to appear on the November 2027 ballot. Until then, this November's ballot in Texas is candidates only.