Travis County Cleared a 32,000-Application Registration Backlog, and Is Still Fighting the State's Election Software
A late delivery of more than 32,000 voter-registration applications from DPS and problems with Texas' TEAM 2.0 system have added work for Travis County officials ahead of the November midterms, with the backlog cleared but voter-list corrections continuing.
Travis County election officials say a late surge of voter-registration applications and persistent problems with state election software have complicated preparations for the November midterms, according to an Austin Focal report read in full this cycle. The Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector's office, led by Celia Israel, received more than 32,000 registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety about two weeks before the Oct. 5 registration deadline, the report said. DPS routinely collects applications, but a system error left them unprocessed and unsent to county registrars.
Israel's staff worked overtime and cleared the backlog by Oct. 9, the report said, and the unexpected work delayed processing of the usual last-minute wave of paper applications - about 20,000 of them pushed back while staff handled the DPS data. Some applications were more than a year old, and Israel said it was unclear how many people who had tried to register may have been unable to vote in the March primary, according to the report, which also said DPS had not provided counties a full explanation beyond referring to software problems, and that voting-rights groups are suing the state over the unprocessed applications.
The county is also contending with problems in TEAM 2.0, the state-run system used to manage voter records and mail ballots, the report said. County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado said the upgraded software was still lagging and malfunctioning days before early voting began, that thousands of eligible voters were missing when the official list was transferred to electronic poll books and had to be added back manually, and that the loss of a bulk-upload function means a mail-ballot update that once took about 10 minutes for more than 17,000 records now takes about two minutes per record, with roughly 30,000 mail ballots expected this election, according to the report. Travis County has nearly 1 million registered voters, including 138,342 on the state's suspense list, a designation that does not prevent someone from voting, the report said.
