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Four days before the start of early voting in Texas, county officials said they learned Thursday about another state error that has backlogged thousands of voter registration records.
This error affected address updates submitted through the state’s voter registration name and address change website between Sept. 1 and sometime last week.
That means election officials just receiving the records must quickly determine which were submitted before the Oct. 5 registration deadline and therefore must be updated in time for the start of early voting Monday.
The total number of backlogged records wasn’t immediately available, but the secretary of state’s office told election officials Thursday that not all counties were impacted.
According to the Texas Association of County Election Officials, Bexar County election officials on Thursday received 3,000 records to process, Travis County received 1,100, Williamson County received 700, and Hays County received 400.
This is the latest in a string of challenges for increasingly hard-pressed local election officials. Earlier this week, county officials said they had cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records that had piled up for over a year due to a separate state error involving a software update to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s online driver’s license portal. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has offered counties grants to offset costs such as overtime pay and bringing in additional staff to help. Election officials said the state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, made the backlog harder to resolve at a critical time.
Now they must contend with a new issue while they prepare voting equipment and supplies and equip poll workers for early voting. On top of that, election officials are also working through ballot-by-mail applications and processing remaining voter registration applications submitted by the deadline.
“Just when most counties were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, another unexpected backlog is being dropped on county voter registrars,” said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.
“This continued mismanagement at the state level requires action and accountability from the Texas Legislature, because the current unpredictability of the TEAM system is unsustainable for our state’s election system,” McGinn said.
Some counties have reported the new backlogged records are missing necessary address information, McGinn said. The secretary of state’s office is escalating the issue to resolve it, he said.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and the Texas Department of Information Resources did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Thursday email to county election officials obtained by Votebeat, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections director, said her office had identified an error with Texas.gov – a website that offers various services such as online updates to vehicle registrations and updates to voter registration records such as name changes and address changes.
The site is managed by the Texas Department of Information Resources and the websites were developed by Deloitte, the same vendor that works with DPS.
In the email, Adkins said the issue was “an extra address validation with Texas.gov,” and Civix, the vendor, which runs the TEAM system, “has rerun all files from September 1 through the present to identify any affected voters. The Texas Online registration updates that were impacted by this will be sent out to the counties today.”
Adkins said not all counties had registrations that were impacted by the error and that “many counties will not see any increase to their Texas Online registrations at this time.”
Voters who have questions about their voter registration should contact their county voter registrar directly. A list of voter registrars by county is available here.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
Disclosure: Deloitte has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
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