WeedVoter

Howard Olsen Republican

Texas House, District 50

About this race: North Austin. Neither candidate holds state legislative office, so neither appears in any 2025 cannabis or hemp roll call. Both were checked against the same sources and neither has a documented act.

Howard OlsenRepublican

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 Howard Olsen, and the limits on it

Checked on 2026-09-18: the member-level rolls of every 2025 cannabis and hemp record vote in the official Texas House and Senate Journals — SB 3 and HB 46 in the regular session, SB 5 in the first called session and SB 6 in the second — where they do not appear, because they hold no Texas legislative office; the author, coauthor and sponsor lists for SB 3 and HB 46 at the Legislature's own bill-lookup service; and a press sweep including the Spectrum News report on the March 2026 Austin candidate forum on THC policy, which quotes six candidates by name and does not include them.

The candidate's own campaign site was read on 2026-09-20 at www.howardolsen4texas.com — found by search and confirmed to name this candidate before it was attributed to them. 1 page was read: the homepage, any JavaScript bundle it loads, and the pages linked from it. None contains cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD or Compassionate Use.

⚠️This covers the reachable site, not necessarily the whole site: a page that nothing links to cannot be found this way, and at least one Texas candidate keeps their platform on exactly such a page.

Also checked on 2026-09-21: Ballotpedia, which has no article for this candidate under any spelling of their name that we could find.

⚠️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.

Also checked on 2026-10-05: the Texas Hemp Business Council’s published 2026 candidate questionnaire roster at texashempbusinesscouncil.com/wp-json/thbc/v1/candidate-responses and texashempbusinesscouncil.com/candidate-responses. The council is a hemp industry trade association; it put twenty questions about hemp and THC policy to 221 named candidates for the Texas Legislature and statewide office, this candidate among them, and publishes the answers it receives.

On the date checked the council’s own roster recorded this candidate’s status as "awaiting" and carried no answers from them; 30 of the 221 had answered by that date and this candidate was not one of them. The council states that answers are added as they are completed, so this records only what the roster showed on 2026-10-05.

This card has been corrected. What an earlier version of it said, and what was wrong with it, 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 Howard Olsen

Pages read in full:

  • onyourballot.vote411.org/m/race-detail.do?id=71565573 — sections on the page: Qualifications; Education; Resources; Healthcare; Data Centers — 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.
  • www.howardolsen4texas.com their own site — sections on the page: Read 2026-09-20. No cannabis, marijuana, hemp, THC, CBD or Compassionate Use anywhere on the page.

See the whole Texas House, District 50 race, including every opponent →

Who is paying for this campaign

Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission

We could not match a Commission filer number to this name. The Commission’s list of candidates who have appointed a campaign treasurer carried no single row matching both the surname and the given name on the ballot for this seat, so none was guessed at. Howard Olsen may have filed under a different form of their name.

Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here. Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation — the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.

Search campaign filings at the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type “Contributions” and search by name.

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 Howard Olsen 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.