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Four days before early voting begins in Texas, county officials said they became aware Thursday of another state error that delayed the filing of thousands of voter registration records.
This error affected address updates submitted through the state’s voter registration change name and address website between Sept. 1 and last week.
That means election officials who have just received the filings must quickly determine which ones were submitted before the Oct. 5 registration deadline and therefore must be updated in time for the start of early voting on Monday.
Fifteen thousand affected records were sent to counties, said Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas secretary of state’s office, but not all counties were affected.
According to the Texas Association of County Election Officials, election officials in Bexar County received 3,000 applications to process on Thursday, Travis County received 1,100, Williamson County received 700 and Hays County received 400.
It’s the latest in a series of challenges facing increasingly hard-pressed local elections officials. Earlier this week, county officials said they had cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records that had built up for more than 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 grants to counties to offset costs such as paying overtime and hiring additional staff to help. Election officials said the state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, made the backlog more difficult to resolve at a critical time.
They now face a new problem while preparing voting equipment and supplies and equipping poll workers for early voting. In addition to this, election officials are also working on absentee ballot applications and processing remaining voter registration applications submitted on time.
“Just when most counties were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, another unexpected backlog is being cleared in county election records,” 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 not sustainable for our state’s election system,” McGinn said.
Some counties have reported that new, late filings lack the necessary address information, McGinn said. The secretary of state’s office is escalating the problem 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 an email to county election officials obtained by Votebeat on Thursday, Christina Adkins, the state’s elections director, said her office identified an error with Texas.gov — a website that offers various services such as online updates of vehicle registrations and updates to voter registration records, such as name 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. But officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s office told Votebeat that the problem stemmed from its Louisiana-based vendor, Civix, which runs the TEAM system.
In the email, Adkins said the issue was “additional address validation with Texas.gov,” and Civix, the vendor, which manages the TEAM system, “reran all files from September 1 to today to identify affected voters. Texas online registration updates that were affected by this will be sent to counties today.”
Adkins said not all counties had registrations affected by the error and that “many counties will not see an increase in their Texas Online registrations at this time.”
Voters who have questions regarding their voter registration should contact their county registrar’s office directly. A list of voting records 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 nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that is funded in part by donations from its members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial support plays no role in our journalism. Find a full list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
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