Election officials wary of shift to Texas’ centralized voter-registration system

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An effort to force all of Texas’ 254 counties onto the state’s central system for managing voter registration has some election officials concerned about the system’s history of technical problems, its capacity to handle larger volumes of data and the potential for new security risks.

Thirty-two Texas counties, including some of the state’s largest, currently use private vendors for software to handle voter registration and election management tasks. The software helps counties manage information including voters’ addresses, voting history, registration applications, images of signatures for verification, images of mail-ballot envelopes and other personal data.

Pending legislation, Senate Bill 2382, would require counties to exclusively use the state’s system, called Texas Election Administration Management, or TEAM. Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, filed the bill after many counties last year faced a surprise surcharge from one of the private vendors, Votec.

Proponents say the bill would give state officials a more detailed picture of how counties manage voter registration. For example, TEAM would allow them to closely monitor the steps that election officials take to remove ineligible voters from their lists, said Christina Adkins, state elections director, during a House Elections Committee hearing last summer.

But relying on a single system would be risky, said Frank Phillips, the elections administrator in Denton County, one of the 32 counties that currently use third-party systems. Those counties are collectively home to roughly 75% of registered voters in the state.

Under the current arrangement, “if something catastrophic were to happen — ransomware, software failure — at least 75% of the voters in Texas would be fine,” Phillips said. If all counties are on the state system and something goes wrong, “the whole state is paralyzed. That’s dangerous.”

Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, said the state system is secure, has data backups and has the necessary capacity. The office is also actively seeking feedback from county election officials on how to improve its functionality, she said.

The bill came up for discussion this week in the Senate State Affairs Committee, the panel that decides the fate of most election-related legislation in the upper chamber. The committee has not yet voted on whether to advance the bill to the full Senate. Bettencourt, the sponsor, did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment.

Some counties have made the switch

Last year’s surcharge from Votec left many counties scrambling to either find another vendor or come up with more money to avoid an abrupt switch that would have created challenges for administering a smooth primary election. Soon after, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office began urging counties to join TEAM, as the state prepared to launch a revamped version of it.

Since then, at least two large counties, Travis and Hays, have ditched their contracts with private vendors and adopted TEAM. Unlike the outside software vendors, the state doesn’t charge counties to use TEAM, although Hays County has spent $30,000 to store large image files, a feature TEAM currently doesn’t offer. Travis County has spent about $70,000.

Celia Israel, Travis County’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, said her office began using TEAM in March in anticipation of the Legislature making it a requirement.

“And ultimately, this is the mothership. This is the database that we all rely upon,” Israel said. She said her staff is better off trying out the new system ahead of a smaller-turnout election in May.

“We haven’t had any issues. It’s been running smoothly,” she said.

Private software already links with TEAM

All private voter registration management software must be approved by the state before counties can use it. The Secretary of State’s Office makes sure all such private products can exchange files with TEAM, which itself runs on software from a private vendor, Civix. The new version of TEAM with added features, also developed by Civix, is scheduled to launch this summer.

At the legislative hearing, representatives of some private software vendors that are approved to work with Texas counties said that they could provide the detailed information the state is seeking.

“They can just indicate when we get recertified on an annual basis that we have to provide that access and information to the state, so they can have real-time information,” said Ben Martin, chief operating officer of VR Systems. The company’s clients include Denton County, which has nearly 650,000 registered voters, and Tarrant County, with more than 1 million.

Most smaller counties already enter their voter registration data directly into TEAM, which was first developed in 2004. At the time, nearly half of Texas’ 254 counties reported that it was slow and did not allow them to “perform their jobs effectively,” according to a 2007 state audit. The state has since revamped it, but some election officials say TEAM remains inconsistent.

For example, they say TEAM can take anywhere from minutes to hours to produce a standard report using election data, such as a list of voters in the county who have requested an absentee ballot. The system can’t produce customized reports that may be needed to, for example, fulfill a detailed public records request. TEAM currently also lacks image storage capabilities that counties use to archive images of voter registration applications, absentee ballot applications and images of signatures for verification.

In Brazos County, home to College Station, election administrator Trudy Hancock said her staff has used TEAM for years and continually encountered problems while managing records of overseas voters.

Some data often has to be reentered multiple times, she said. In other instances, the system has duplicated records.

“All of that has to be done in a timely manner, but when we’re entering it, saving it and the system is not taking it and we delete and try again, it just becomes very time-consuming,” she said. Hancock said she has notified the Secretary of State’s Office of the problem, but it hasn’t been resolved.

Those sorts of issues are why dozens of counties still maintain their own voter registration databases using private vendors. Those counties are required by state law to sync their data daily with TEAM.

State says improvements in the works

Pierce, the Secretary of State’s Office spokesperson, said staff members are assigned to help counties resolve technical problems, and turn to the state’s own software vendor if the problems persist. “With any system, there's always potential for user error,” Pierce said.

As the state has worked to develop the revamped version of TEAM, Pierce said, the counties have had direct input in the functionalities and features of the upcoming system.

“They have also been testing it and making sure that it’s functioning well,” Pierce said.

But Ed Johnson, a Harris County Republican and a member of the local party ballot security committee, told lawmakers that the large counties that have so far been reluctant to use TEAM have real needs the system doesn’t meet.

He suggested to lawmakers that they find a way for the counties to share any necessary information with the state without requiring the use of TEAM mandatory.

If approved, the bill, as written now, would take effect in September.

Jennifer Doinoff, legislative chair of the Texas Association of Election Officials, told lawmakers Monday that the organization’s members want the chance to test out the state system gradually because of the concerns some election officials have raised.

“Let the state get that system into place first and let the counties that are remaining do it over some time,” Doinoff said.

Disclosure: Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

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