Travis County Clears a 32,000-Application Registration Backlog, but State Election Software Still Lags
A late DPS delivery of more than 32,000 voter-registration applications was cleared by October 9, county officials say - but the state's TEAM 2.0 system is still slowing voter-list and mail-ballot work in the middle of early voting.
Travis County election workers have cleared one problem and are still wrestling with another. The county's Tax Assessor-Collector's office received more than 32,000 voter-registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety about two weeks before the October 5 registration deadline, after a system error left the applications unprocessed and unsent to county registrars, according to The Austin Focal's reporting.
Tax Assessor-Collector Celia Israel's staff worked overtime and cleared that backlog by October 9. The unexpected work pushed back about 20,000 of the usual last-minute paper applications, and some of the DPS applications were more than a year old. Israel said it was unclear how many people who had tried to register may have been unable to vote in the March primary, and that DPS had not given counties a full explanation beyond referring to software problems.
The list work continues. 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, since voters can generally resolve it by providing a statement of residence. Israel said staff removed about 5,000 voters from the list over one recent weekend and kept working through the rest.
The second problem is the state's own system. County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado said TEAM 2.0, the state-run system used to manage voter records and mail ballots, was still lagging and malfunctioning days before early voting began: thousands of eligible voters were missing when the official list was transferred to the electronic poll books and had to be added back manually, and the loss of a bulk-upload function means mail-ballot records that once took about 10 minutes for 17,000 entries now take about two minutes each, with roughly 30,000 mail ballots expected this election. Early voting runs through Friday, October 30, and the county is preparing a record 201 polling places for Election Day, November 3.
