The Road to Open the Polls

It’s the first week of early voting for a decisively high-stakes midterm election. Nearly 41,000 Austin-area voters cast a ballot on Monday. The Travis County Elections Division reports they’ll open a record 201 polling places on Election Day. But getting to this point was not seamless for the county, local election officials told the Chronicle.

Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector Celia Israel’s office, which handles voter registration, had received a sudden surge of over 32,000 voter registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety merely two weeks before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline.

The surge was the result of a backlog caused by DPS – a state agency that routinely registers Texans to vote – which failed to send the applications to county voter registrars for processing due to an error in the department’s system, Votebeat first reported. Voting rights groups are now suing the state over the backlog.

“We didn’t know that there was stuff stuck in the couch cushions, so to speak, and that they would unload it all in one lump and so close to the voter registration deadline, which is of course so frustrating,” Israel told the Chronicle. “But, you know, we dealt with it.”

Israel’s office, with people working overtime, was able to clear the backlog by Oct. 9. Some of the voter registration data they received from DPS was over a year old, which means an unknown number of people who had attempted to register to vote were likely turned away at the polls during the March primary election, Israel said.

And despite the agency’s finger-pointing to a third-party software error as causing the backlog, DPS still hasn’t given Texas counties “a full and complete explanation” for the significant mistake, Israel told us on Oct. 19.

“They didn’t talk to the media. They just gave the data to the Secretary of State. … They have subsequently talked about some kind of software issues, but it’s unprecedented, right? Because it was a whole year-plus’ worth of data that we were not receiving,” Israel said.

In a typical year, there’s already a surge of application submissions close to the voter registration deadline. The DPS backlog meant that work to process the typical rush of paper applications – Texas doesn’t have online voter registration – had to be delayed, Israel said.

“Adding 32,000 unplanned pieces of data affected us,” Israel said. “About 20,000 pieces of paper got pushed to the back burner because we needed to address the DPS data, so it absolutely put a clog in the system, and it was very disappointing … but we don’t have the luxury of whining about it. Democracy is on the line.”

On top of the delays with voter registration, Travis County is seeing a modestly higher number of voters on the suspense list, Israel noted. Out of nearly 1 million registered voters in Travis County, 138,342 are currently on the suspense list.

Being on the suspense list doesn’t mean one can’t vote and is often resolved by providing a statement of residence. “I know we knocked out about another 5,000 over the weekend. It’s just going to be a running gap that we’re working to fill,” Israel said.

While Israel’s office handles voter registration, Travis County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado runs the election itself. Her office uses a state-run system, called TEAM, to process mail-in ballots, update voter records, and more.

After TEAM was updated to “TEAM 2.0” last year, Travis County repeatedly raised serious concerns with the buggy update to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, which runs the system. And days before early voting began, Limon-Mercado’s office was still experiencing lags and bugs with TEAM 2.0.

“Dealing with the rollout of enterprise systems, they’re going to have bugs. Like, certain modules or certain buttons aren’t going to work the way they used to,” Limon-Mercado told us. “The issue here is, obviously, we’re holding people’s right to participate in the election hostage as a result of those bugs.”

The problems are not minor. When manually transferring the Official List of Registered Voters from the TEAM system to Travis County’s e-poll books, voters are disappearing from the rolls, Limon-Mercado said.

“There is some data that’s being lost on the back end. So when we’re trying to pull the list over [from the state], there’s a few thousand voters who should be on the list who are not appearing on the list,” Limon-Mercado told the Chronicle. “And so we’re having to identify the discrepancies manually, and then add those voters back into the official list of registered voters.”

The new TEAM 2.0 update also requires Limon-Mercado’s team to individually record if a voter has been sent their requested ballot by mail. 

“We would typically get that list and bulk upload it into TEAM, so that TEAM updated all 17,000-plus records to say, all of these voters have been sent a ballot. TEAM 2.0 no longer allows us to do that. Now, every record has to be updated individually,” the clerk said. 

The bulk upload used to take about 10 minutes, Limon-Mercado continued. “Now, we’re having to spend about two minutes for every single record,” she emphasized. “And we ultimately expect to process about 30,000 ballots-by-mail this election.”

That means Limon-Mercado’s team is having to put in a significant number of additional hours to do the same amount of work. “The state is not covering the cost of those additional hours,” Limon-Mercado said. “The taxpayers are on the hook for all of this.”

She said her team is in contact with the Secretary of State’s Office “multiple times a day” to communicate issues with TEAM 2.0. “That conversation is happening throughout the day, every day,” she told us. 

We asked about the state department’s responsiveness to that feedback. “At the staff level, the communication is fine,” Limon-Mercado replied. “I think there is a disconnect between the higher-ups in the office, who obviously are very politically aligned,” noting that the secretary of state is appointed by the governor.

“Greg Abbott’s political intentions – and how that is coloring these scenarios we’re in, and whether or not that’s coloring the customer service that we’re getting at the staff level – I couldn’t tell you,” Limon-Mercado said. “But our job is to communicate on the behalf of Travis County voters and ensure the state is doing their job, so we can do our job. And we’ve continued to do that.”

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