Texas Clears Voter Registration Backlog Before Early Voting
Texas election officials cleared a massive voter registration backlog caused by software glitches just days before early voting begins on Monday.
Texas state election officials have cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration applications ahead of the start of early voting on Monday. The initial crisis stemmed from a software glitch in the Texas Department of Public Safety's online driver's license portal, which failed to transmit registration records to home counties.
While the primary backlog was resolved, county officials identified a second error on Thursday affecting approximately 15,000 address updates submitted via Texas.gov between September 1 and mid-October. This second failure involved address validation errors between the vendor Civix and the TEAM system. Local officials must now manually determine which of these updates were submitted before the October 5 deadline.
To mitigate the impact of these systemic failures, the Texas Secretary of State's Office provided grants to counties to cover temporary staffing and overtime costs. The Texas Association of County Election Officials criticized the state-level mismanagement of the TEAM system, which is operated by the Louisiana-based vendor GCR Inc.
