WeedVoter

Ben Mendoza Independent

US House, District 23

About this race: A US House seat on the 120th Congress map, covering all of Brewster, Crane, Crockett, Culberson, Edwards, Frio, Hudspeth, Jeff Davis, Kinney, Loving, Medina, Pecos, Presidio, Reagan, Reeves, Schleicher, Sutton, Terrell, Upton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Ward, Winkler and Zavala counties, most of Maverick County, most of El Paso County and part of north-west Bexar County. No candidate on this ballot holds Texas legislative office, so none appears in a 2025 cannabis or hemp roll call. What each candidate has said or answered is listed on the race page in date order, each with its own source.

Whose record this page shows. The paragraph above is about the race, not about this candidate in particular. Everything after this line on this page is Ben Mendoza’s own record and nothing else — including, where it says so, the finding that no record was located. No cannabis record is listed on this page for Ben Mendoza, so where the paragraph above points at records, it is pointed at the race page and not at this one. Every record the paragraph above describes is set out candidate by candidate on the US House, District 23 race page.

Which map this is. This seat is drawn on the 120th Congress map, the one on the 3 November ballot. Measured by area — not by population — 99.9% of it was inside district 23 on the 119th Congress map, which stands until the end of 2026. These lines barely moved, so the member who holds seat 23 today was elected over almost exactly this ground. Check your own address in the district finder.

Ben MendozaIndependent

No source of this candidate’s own is on this card. Everything below was published by someone else. So the absence of a cannabis position here is weaker evidence than it looks: it may mean only that this candidate has not published a platform anywhere we have found, or has published one somewhere we are not permitted to read.

No record compiled yet. Nothing on cannabis — no vote, bill, statement or endorsement — was found in any source we could read. 2 limits on that search are recorded with it.

What was checked for Ben Mendoza, and the limits on it

Checked on 2026-09-18: their San Antonio Report profile, their Ballotpedia entry and an independent candidate directory.

Also checked: the Spectrum News report of 2026-03-03 on Texas candidates and THC policy, the only outlet that put the question directly to 2026 congressional candidates, which does not quote them; and NORML’s Texas guide, which covers sitting members of Congress only. We also checked the full membership roll of the 89th Texas Legislature: this candidate is not a member, so there is no state roll call to attribute.

Also checked, and read in full on 2026-09-18: this candidate's Ballotpedia profile at ballotpedia.org/Ben_Mendoza, including any Candidate Connection survey answers published there, which contains no mention of cannabis, marijuana, hemp, THC or CBD.

Their Ballotpedia profile was read in full on 2026-09-20 at ballotpedia.org/Ben_Mendoza (24822 characters). It contains no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8 or Compassionate Use. When we re-read their Ballotpedia profile on 2026-10-16, it recorded that they had not completed Ballotpedia’s 2026 Candidate Connection survey.

⚠️This card does not tell you whether this candidate held a seat in an earlier Legislature, but the question is now narrower. Read on 2026-10-15, from each chamber’s own journal: the roll of members-elect that the Texas House Journal prints, district by district, on the first day of every regular session from the 75th Legislature (1997) through the 89th (2025), and every senator the Texas Senate Journal names with a district on the first day of every regular session from the 76th (1999) through the 89th.

For the 89th those are journals.house.texas.gov/hjrnl/89r/pdf/89RDAY01FINAL.PDF and journals.senate.texas.gov/SJRNL/89R/HTML/89RSJ01-14-F.HTM and every journal read is listed on this site’s corrections page. No one by this candidate’s name appears in any of them. That is narrower than a negative answer. Those rolls name the members seated as each session opened, and in most years the Senate’s names the senators who were not up for election by surname alone, so a member who sat only in earlier sessions, who arrived at a special election and was never named in full on a later first day, or who served under another name would not be found this way.

If this candidate is one of those, there may be a cannabis voting record this site is missing.

⚠️Whether this candidate has a campaign site of their own is an open question here, and not a negative answer. This guide has not found one. It no longer claims to have looked in a way that could settle it, because the method this card used to cite was put to a case it was known to have passed and came back just as empty there. So if this candidate publishes a platform of their own, this guide may simply not have reached it, and the absence of a cannabis position below is weaker evidence than it looks.

This card has been corrected. What earlier versions of it said, and what was wrong with them, is published in the corrections log.

No score: this candidate has no recorded vote or bill authorship on a cannabis measure. Silence is not a position, so nothing is inferred from it.

Campaign sites and voter guides checked for Ben Mendoza

Pages read in full:

  • onyourballot.vote411.org/m/race-detail.do?id=71789979 — sections on the page: the questions this chapter prints in full, under no section labels — the question set the local League of Women Voters chapter wrote for this race, read in full by us on 2026-10-06. Not one of its questions asks about cannabis, hemp or drug policy. ⚠️Against every question this Candidate's entry reads "Candidate has not yet responded", so this records an unanswered questionnaire and not a silence of their own choosing. Their entry carries no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, hemp-derived, THC, thc-a, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation, psilocybin, Compassionate Use, consumable hemp, SB 3, Senate Bill 3, HB 1325 or HB 46. 1 other local chapter(s) publish the same race; the fullest entry is the one cited here.
  • votetheperson.org/candidates/ben-mendoza — sections on the page: Candidate; Your match; Record; Sources — the whole of the independent candidate tracker Vote the Person's page for this candidate, read in full by us on 2026-10-06. The page states the office or district we have on file, so the identification is confirmed, and it cites 4 source(s) of its own. Marijuana is one of the issues it tracks by name, and it lists Marijuana among the 36 issues on which it found no public position for this candidate. ⚠️That is a second organisation reporting an empty search, not a statement by the candidate.
  • sanantonioreport.org/profile/ben-mendoza-2026-candidate-for-texas-23rd-congressional-district — sections on the page: this candidate's San Antonio Report 2026 candidate profile, a questionnaire they answered, which names them as the independent in the 23rd Congressional District, read in full by us on 2026-10-06 (6371 characters of text). It contains no occurrence, on a word boundary, of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, hemp-derived, THC, thc-a, CBD, delta-8, delta-9, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation, psilocybin, Compassionate Use, consumable hemp, SB 3, Senate Bill 3, HB 1325 or HB 46.

See the whole US House, District 23 race, including every opponent →

Who is paying for this campaign

Campaign finance — Federal Election Commission

Commission candidate H6TX16111, filed as “MENDOZA, BEN”. fec.gov

No amount is printed here, deliberately. This candidate has no principal campaign committee registered for the 2026 cycle, so the Commission holds no money reports for them. A candidate with no committee has filed no money reports, so there is nothing to show — that is what the filings say, not a gap in our work.

Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.

Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive. For what Ben Mendoza has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one, every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves that score by a cent.