Bexar County’s new backlog of unprocessed voter registration applications has grown to 6,600 while staff struggle with a lagging system provided by the state, county Elections Administrator Michele Carew said Tuesday.
Much like the backlog ahead of last fall’s election, Bexar County Elections staff are scrambling to process a growing mound of data in time for the March primary.
Hoping to leave a lagging statewide voter-registration system behind, the county is waiting to finalize a contract for a new third-party vendor’s system. However, that contract has been delayed as it continues to undergo revisions, according to county officials.
Meanwhile, workers in the Bexar County Elections Department are left contending with the system provided by the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, which has slowed data input times from 24 voters per hour to only eight, Precinct 4 Commissioner Tommy Calvert told the Current.
This new backlog comes mere months after a backlog of voter registrations at Bexar County Elections Department ballooned to more than 70,000 in the fall, requiring the county hire on dozens of temporary staffers working in shifts to process the backlog in time for the November election.
Still, in the mad dash to input data, some voters — Calvert was one of them — fell through the cracks and showed up to vote only to realize that they weren’t in the system.
Much like last time, County officials attribute the current bottleneck to the Texas Secretary of State’s voter registration system TEAM (now upgraded to TEAM 2.0) and its inability to process the amount of data required for large counties such as Bexar.
Last week, Commissioner Calvert told the Current that Bexar County Elections Department workers weren’t just dealing with lagging input times but also certain screens that weren’t appearing for them in TEAM.
Elections Administrator Carew told the Current at a Tuesday meeting that her department is once again hiring temporary workers to process the new backlog in time for the upcoming primary. She said with the help of 12 or more temp workers added to staff, she expects the backlog to be addressed within one to two weeks — which could mean cutting it close to the Feb. 17 start of early voting.
Speaking with the Current after the same Tuesday meeting of the Commissioners Court, County Judge Peter Sakai echoed Carew’s confidence that the backlog will be addressed in time.
“We once again have a backlog, but it is much smaller. I understand that elections staff has taken remedial action, and they are plowing through the backlog,” Sakai said. “And I know that the Elections Department is prepared to have a safe and fair election.”
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