AUSTIN (KXAN) — A July update to the Texas Election Administration Management, or TEAM, software has caused several Texas counties to experience backlogs of new voter registrations, according to Sept. 25 reporting from the nonprofit news organization Votebeat.
Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras told KXAN that officials expected run into some issues with the update. TEAM was adopted by many counties in the early 2000s.
“This is a huge upgrade that the state is doing to this system,” she said. “It’s a very, very important fundamental system in this process of elections … what the state is doing is basically completely redesigning what it is.”
Contreras said she spoke with elections officials in several counties who’ve run into problems with the update, leading to a growing backlog of registrations. For example, Travis County told her that it had more than 12,000 applications waiting to be processed.
“Election officials actually have up to 30 days to mail back your voter registration. So there’s that window, but it usually doesn’t take that long,” she said. “What some voters had been experiencing, and which is what we reported on, is that they’ve been waiting months at this point.”
Texas’ deadline to register to vote is Oct. 6. Prospective voters who mail in their registration by then can request a provisional ballot if they haven’t received confirmation by Election Day in November.
According to Contreras, county election workers will work through the weekend to process registrations.
“They’re working out these problems and functionality problems right now,” she said. “New applications are coming in every day, and so voters should know that they’re working through this.”
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