Elections officials across Texas are scrambling to register voters after the near-collapse of a voter registration company led counties across the state to transfer to a system provided through the Texas Secretary of State’s office.

Votec, a California-based company that has run voter registration everywhere from Harris County to Travis County, warned officials in August that a grim fiscal outlook had cast doubt on their ability to register voters ahead of the November election.

The scare sparked a mass exodus of counties from Votec to the Texas Elections Management System, a statewide database that has been used by the Secretary of State’s Office to manage voter registration information since the early 2000s. But the transition to TEAM has been bumpy, and came just as the state rolled out a major update to the system. All told, the switch has left as many as 17,000 voters in Harris County and 400 in Fort Bend County in limbo with just days before early voting is scheduled to begin.

“Our system does interface with TEAM, and we have had issues since July with that functionality,” said John Oldham, elections administrator in Fort Bend County, adding that TEAM had never been the county’s primary voter registration system. “We seem to be working through that, and our unprocessed voters have dropped from around 40,000 to something in the neighborhood of 400. This happened just this week. We had been unable to send out new voter certificates, but (we) will hopefully begin doing so in the next few days.”

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Votec did not fully shut down, according to reporting from the Texas Tribune, but the company’s dire financial position and the abrupt departure of several key executives have caused many counties to turn toward TEAM and other sources for voter registration services, including those in Fort Bend County.

A spokesperson for the Harris County Tax Office, which has served as the voter registrar since the dissolution of the elections administrator position in 2023, said in a statement that the county is doing everything in its power to register voters before November.

“The Tax Office has timely processed and submitted all voter registration applications to the Secretary of State for verification,” the statement read. “As of October 13, there are 17,430 voter registration applications that were submitted by the October 6 deadline and are pending state verification. Once state verification is complete, the Harris County voter rolls can be promptly updated.”

Harris County residents who have registered recently or have updated their voter information should check their registration status at hctax.net and may call the tax office at 713-274-8200 with any questions or concerns, the spokesperson said.

In an email to the Chronicle, the spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said the “state verification is a fully automated process with no manual work” completed by staff. Officials went on to say that it’s not “uncommon for voters to experience a lag period between the time they register and the time their registration shows up online, even beyond the registration deadline.”

“The timing can be impacted simply by the speed and frequency with which counties upload data to TEAM,” said Assistant Secretary of State for Communications Alicia Phillips Pierce. “Or there can be software issues, and in those cases we work with counties to address them immediately as they arise.”

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Oldham said various factors contributed to the accumulation of applications, including the migration over to the TEAM System. But, he believes once it’s been fully implemented, the system will “offer more functionality than the legacy system.”

“Texas has so many elections (we had eight in 2024) that it is hard for the state to find a window of opportunity,” he said. “This should have been the best time to do so, but the vendor may not have been ready.”

It’s unclear whether Fort Bend County will migrate to it or end up staying with a vendor-supplied system in the future. But, in the meantime, Oldham insists residents shouldn’t be worried.

“At this point, I am confident that all Fort Bend voters who are eligible to vote should be able to do so,” he said.

Smaller counties face fewer challenges

Colorado County Election Administrator Rebecka LaCourse echoed the same sentiments as her counterparts in Harris and Fort Bend counties. As of Friday, the county only had “nine voter registration updates that remain unprocessed in the TEAM 2.0 portal.”

“All of these voters are currently registered in our county, and the delay in processing is due to various technical issues within the TEAM 2.0 system,” LaCourse said. “More importantly, these delays will not impact any voter’s ability to participate in the upcoming election.”

At the start of July, Brazoria County had roughly 7,500 unprocessed applications. But, has since processed all of them. Despite the hiccups with TEAM, Brazoria County Election Director Lisa Mujica has high hopes for the future of the program.

“I believe, from what I am seeing, this new updated system will work once everything is ironed out and we learn the new procedures,” she said.

A chore for residents

As state and local officials work out the kinks in the transition to TEAM, one resident went to great lengths to ensure she would be able to cast a ballot in November. After months of trying to verify her voter registration, Houston newcomer and former elections worker Caitlin Cicchetti finally received word in early October that her application had been authenticated by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

“I don’t think enough people in the general public understand how this stuff works, and so knowing what I know about it, when I realized how big this problem was, I was shocked that nobody seems to be aware of it,” Cicchetti said. “How am I the only one raising the red flag on this, because as I was reaching out to Sen. Bettencourt and Rep. Sam Harless, they were like, ‘No, we hadn’t heard of that’.”

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Cicchetti moved to the Lone Star State from Washington back in June. She immediately began taking steps to start anew by registering with all the appropriate entities, including the State of Texas, to obtain her voter card. However, it came with its own set of challenges.

“I called the Secretary of State’s Office, and they were super unhelpful,” Cicchetti said. “They keep insisting that it was a county problem. I’ve worked in voter registration before, so I knew it was not a county problem. The Secretary of State has to confirm that I’m now a resident of Texas before the county can fully register me.”

An employee with Harris County alerted her about the updates to the TEAM system, telling her they hadn’t been able to register voters in months.

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Both the Secretary of State’s Office and the tax office said they understood the challenges associated with the transition to TEAM and would continue to work diligently to iron out any issues ahead of the November election. Residents in Texas with applications received by the deadline, but not processed on time can cast a provisional ballot.

“We have all hands on deck to work through these issues,” said officials with the Secretary of State’s Office. “Our team is working nights and weekends to help Harris County and 23 other counties statewide that are facing an unprecedented situation in which their voter registration vendor went out of business, leaving 14 Texas counties without a functioning registration system.”

This article originally published at Voter system switch leaves thousands of Texas residents unverified ahead of early voting.