Volunteer deputy registrar Deborah McKenzie delivered a stack of voter applications and address update forms, including one for her grandson, to the Tarrant County Elections Office on Sept. 8 — well before the deadline to register to vote in the November election.
A month and a half later, as early voting opened up, the applicants’ registrations had yet to be approved. The applications were among thousands across Tarrant County and the state that were stalled in processing over the summer and fall due to a recent update to Texas’ voter registration system, election officials said.
While Texas and Tarrant County officials maintain that they’ve worked through the backlog and processing errors, voting rights advocates and officials in other counties continue to worry persistent hiccups and slow operating speeds in the state’s system will affect future elections.
“I’m very concerned given the fact that we have a runoff election coming and we’ve got midterms coming up,” McKenzie said. “I’m not entirely sure that our eligible voters were all able to vote in this last election.”
McKenzie, who has volunteered to register people to vote for eight years, said her September drop-off was routine, and all the applications were in order: eight new voter registrations and changes of addresses, including for grandson Jackson Dennie, who turned 18 this year and recently moved to Tarrant County for college.
In July, the Texas Secretary of State’s office overhauled the Texas Election Administration Management system, or TEAM, which the vast majority of counties rely on to register voters.
The system had functionality problems for years, but the overhaul worsened issues as counties prepared for the Nov. 4 election, mixing up voters’ addresses, not saving registration information and incorrectly populating precincts, according to a letter sent to the state by a coalition of Texas counties.
Alicia Pierce, Texas Secretary of State’s office spokesperson, said the office worked overtime to ensure counties were ready for the election following the TEAM updates. She said she didn’t know of any counties that were unable to get their voter registrations finished in time for the elections.
“Counties had a direct line to our office for any issues, and we systematically addressed issues as they arose,” Pierce wrote in an email.
By Sept. 25, Tarrant County had a backlog of about 13,000 voting applications, The Texas Tribune reported at the time. By the second day of early voting nearly a month later, that dropped to about 2,400 applications.
Pierce emphasized that it is normal to see an influx of registrations ahead of election deadlines.
The TEAM overhaul had been in development since late 2023, according to a Secretary of State information sheet. It focused on ensuring information security and using new technologies to make the system more efficient and effective.
Final enhancements will continue into 2026, according to the info sheet, which laid out several strategies to train and support counties through the change.
Clinton Ludwig, Tarrant County’s election administrator, said local officials do not know if or how many would-be voters were unable to cast ballots on Election Day due to the backlog.
He said Tarrant County Elections had “procedures in place,” such as offering provisional ballots, to ensure that eligible voters could still vote.
“Our bottom line is this: If you submit a properly completed voter registration application on time and are eligible to vote in Tarrant County, you will be able to vote,” he said.
Are you registered to vote?
Tarrant County officials recommend registering to vote as soon as you are eligible.
Check your voter registration on the state’s website, and apply to vote here.
Provisional ballots allow people to cast votes when registration is in question. They are subject to heavy scrutiny before being tabulated for official results.
Tarrant County had 286 provisional ballots cast in the Nov. 4 election, 142 of which were accepted. When officials reject provisional ballots, it’s often because the voter was not registered or provided incorrect information.
The state’s delays in registrations stemmed from backlogged data from the Department of Public Safety, said Christopher McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials. Since that was cleared, most counties are staying on top of incoming applications, he said.
Still, McGinn said election officials across the state remain concerned about how slowly the cloud-based TEAM software processes applications. Some counties are staggering shifts outside traditional office hours to work when the software is running smoothest, he said.
“It has really impacted individual counties’ efficiency during the work day,” he said. “Counties still have fundamental concerns about the structure and processes that are required to use the new system. They are not very intuitive compared to the way the old system worked.”
Told to ‘be patient’ for months
In early July, Heather Hood helped her 18-year-old daughter, Darcy, register to vote, just as she had helped her older son a few years before.
Come August, she was surprised to find her daughter’s application was pending. Hood reached out to local and state officials, including lawmakers, for weeks and was consistently told to “be patient,” she said.
“I wasn’t yelling or ranting. I just wanted to know what’s going on,” she said. “Beyond my child, there were people, adults, other kids, who were falling into the same issue.”
Secretary of State officials Hood spoke to indicated Tarrant County officials were causing the delay, she said. Meanwhile, Tarrant County officials told her they were at the mercy of the Secretary of State as batches of voter data the local team sent to the state kept getting flagged for unknown errors.
In a September video call with local election officials, Texas elections director Christina Adkins blamed most of the backlogs on counties, The Texas Tribune reported.
“There is a difference between a county saying, ‘This doesn’t work’ and a county saying, ‘I don’t know how to do this,’” she was quoted as saying. Agency officials later called the TEAM update a “once-in-a-decade upgrade” and said their focus was on helping local election officials adjust to the changes.
Pierce, the Secretary of State’s spokesperson, told the Report that the office was able to quickly onboard several counties that weren’t using TEAM before.
As backlogs persisted, groups representing counties across Texas asked the state to halt the rollout of the system overhaul, according to a letter sent to Secretary of State Jane Nelson. In the letter, the groups cited the software’s inconsistent behavior, statewide training gaps and insufficient support resources.
McGinn, whose organization was among those who signed the letter, said the Secretary of State’s office did not adjust the rollout.
Eventually, after weeks of Hood calling officials almost daily, a Tarrant County elections supervisor directly addressed her daughter’s registration and allowed her to vote.
Voting challenges continued on Election Day
Tarrant County’s Nov. 4 election troubles didn’t stop at registration delays.
On Election Day, the Secretary of State’s “My Voter Portal” webpage pointed Tarrant County voters to only one polling site: Arlington’s Atherton Elementary School.
Residents from across the county relying on the portal showed up to vote at the school, said Marilyn Minnaar, voter education chair for the nonpartisan nonprofit League of Women Voters. McKenzie, the volunteer deputy registrar, said her son and daughter-in-law waited nearly two hours to cast ballots at Atherton.
Tarrant County was one of multiple counties that saw polling locations missing from the state’s portal due to recent software updates, Minnaar said.
At a Dec. 9 meeting, Ludwig, the elections administrator, told Tarrant County commissioners that the missing sites in the portal were due to the new software.
“We upload our list (of locations) to the Secretary of State’s office, but we don’t control what they post, how they post, or their IT,” he told them.
He said the portal appears to be fixed, as it has since correctly mapped out the three early voting locations in the Dec. 13 runoff elections for two local races. Ludwig said the next test is coming in January for the Texas Senate District 9 runoff.
Jackson Dennie, McKenzie’s grandson, cast his ballot Oct. 24, she said. His chance came after weeks of McKenzie calling elected officials, the Secretary of State and Tarrant County staff to ensure her grandson was on the voter rolls.
Receiving limited responses over the phone, she and her grandson went to the county elections office in person to prove that he was an eligible voter. After over an hour, a county staffer “forced his name through the system” to allow him to vote.
“It’s not widely known that this problem existed — people who have run into it have just run into it individually,” McKenzie said. “If there were new voters, they probably didn’t know what to do. My grandson was just lucky enough to know me.”
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
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