US House, District 23
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 below in date order, each with its own source.
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.
How this score is worked out
Seven kinds of act move this number, and they do not count equally. A recorded vote counts 3, and so does authoring a bill or signing an executive action; signing on to somebody else’s bill counts 2. A statement or a questionnaire answer counts 2 as well, and an organisational endorsement counts 1. A vote takes its direction from the bill, whose effect is set out in advance; the rest take it from our reading of what was said, and each one below shows that reading and the reason for it. Acts shown with no number were examined and deliberately left out of the arithmetic, with a reason given.
- 2023-07-07 statement — Treats imprisonment for marijuana possession as a thing to criticise, which points away from criminalisation — but it is a single remark made in an argument about firearms, so it is weak evidence and the card says so, counted as +1 at weight 1.2
Average on the −2 to +2 scale: 1. Full method and the bill table.
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Said2023-07-07
Posted on X, replying to the then Vice President’s account during an exchange about firearms legislation: "Tired of your career of locking people up for marijuana possession, so now you want to lock them up for guns now too?"
⚠️The subject of the exchange was gun policy, not cannabis: the remark criticises imprisonment for marijuana possession but sets out no position on what cannabis law should be.
No record compiled yet. Nothing on cannabis — no vote, bill, statement or endorsement — was found in any source we could read. One limit on that search is recorded with it.
What was checked for Katy Padilla Stout, and the limits on it
Checked on 2026-09-18: their campaign site, two national endorsement-organisation profiles, a San Antonio Report profile, a public radio interview page and a candidate questionnaire service.
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/Katy_Padilla_Stout, 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/Katy_Padilla_Stout (16146 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.
Also checked, and read in full on 2026-10-06: this candidate’s own campaign site at www.katyforcongress.com — 30 pages, reached from the home page’s own links and from the site’s sitemap.xml, each fetched only after its host’s robots.txt had been checked and found to permit it, 52,432 characters of text in all. The site identifies itself as the campaign of Katy Padilla Stout for Congress and names TX-23. The extracted text of those pages contains no occurrence, on a word boundary, of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, Compassionate Use, delta-8, delta-9, dispensary, decriminalize, cannabinoid or psilocybin.
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 Katy Padilla Stout
Pages read in full:
- onyourballot.vote411.org/m/race-detail.do?id=25682690 — sections on the page: Qualifications; Priorities; Health Care; Immigration; Energy; Economy; Artificial Intelligence — 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. The candidate answered, in free text of their own, and no answer of theirs contains, on a word boundary, 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.
- www.katyforcongress.com their own site — sections on the page: the whole of this candidate's own campaign site as this guide read it — 30 pages, reached from the home page’s own links and from the site’s sitemap.xml, each fetched only after its host’s robots.txt had been checked and found to permit it, 52,432 characters of text in all. This row was built on 2026-10-12 out of the sentence above it in this card's own search log, which named the address and said it had been read while the list beside it did not. It records no reading that the log had not already published. Read 2026-10-17 in a fresh crawl starting from the homepage: 26 pages read at HTTP 200 (the homepage, the site’s sitemaps, every page it links to one level down, and the pages under its issues and news sections); 1 at HTTP 500 could not be read. No cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8, cannabinoid, rescheduling, Schedule iii, safer Banking or decriminalisation term on a word boundary in the text or the raw page source of any page read. The same crawler, run the same day from each homepage, found the published cannabis planks on three campaign sites used as controls.
- kvia.com/voter-guide-2026/u-s-representative-texas-district-23/2026/10/06/katy-padilla-stout-candidate-for-texas-congressional-district-23-representative — sections on the page: Read 2026-10-17, HTTP 200. KVIA ABC-7’s 2026 voter-guide entry for this candidate, headed Katy Padilla Stout (D), candidate for Texas Congressional District 23 representative, published 2026-10-06. It carries no answers: an editor’s note says the station sent her a questionnaire and is waiting for her response, and the entry lists only her name, party and occupation. The page contains no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8 or Compassionate Use.
- sanantonioreport.org/profile/katy-padilla-stout-2026-candidate-for-texas-23rd-congressional-district — sections on the page: The San Antonio Report’s candidate profile, first published 2026-01-08 and last updated 2026-10-08, including its "Hear from the candidate" section of the candidate’s own answers, read in full by us on 2026-10-17 (HTTP 200). None of its questions asks about cannabis, hemp or THC, and no answer of theirs contains cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation or Compassionate Use.
- www.tpr.org/government-politics/2026-10-14/herrera-and-padilla-stout-clash-over-guns-border-security-and-character-in-heated-texas-23rd-cd-debate — sections on the page: A Texas Public Radio written report of the Texas 23rd Congressional District candidates’ debate, published 2026-10-14, read in full by us on 2026-10-17 (HTTP 200). It quotes or paraphrases the candidate and contains no occurrence of cannabis, marijuana, marihuana, hemp, THC, CBD, delta-8, cannabinoid, dispensary, decriminalisation or Compassionate Use.
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.
All 3 candidates on this ballot are listed.