There apparently snafus regarding registration in the recent election. She offers an explanation.
- Click here for the link.
- Click here for the link.
The article “Amid concerns, county rechecks voter registrations” in The Daily News on Oct. 28 fairly well reported the situation with regard to the Galveston ISD election but, sadly, the entire story was not told. Clarification is necessary for the benefit of all Texas registered voters, voter registrars, county clerks and election administrators.
What was not included in the story is that the Galveston County Tax Office Voter Registration team knew in advance of the GISD election that there were issues with the state’s new system. What we did not know at the onset of that election is that only three system generated reports were working properly.
Over the summer, GCTO created a new election district for League City’s sales tax election. My staff worked overtime creating the new district. During this process, lists were being generated to insure everything was working properly. As we uncovered system errors, they were reported to the Election Division of the SOS’s Office for investigation. Workarounds were implemented to help us complete our task as new issues arose.
We discovered during that time that streets previously coded odd and even located on boundaries of every precinct (county commissioner, state representatives, justice of the peace and constables, city, school district and community college single-member districts, etc.) had been merged into the single category “both” during the state’s conversion. We began working with the EDSOS to identify affected streets and to request assistance correcting them as the existing process is manual and time consuming. Just recently we were provided a listing of more than 6,000 affected streets and a test environment through which the EDSOS will assist with untangling these streets and properly coding the districts.
In the interim, with an important local election underway, we focused on GISD and the League City elections. Another important piece missing from the article is that, for the first time in six years, the County Clerk’s Election Division and the GCTO Voter Registration Department were working in partnership — not at odds — to insure the integrity of the elections was preserved.
Of much greater interest statewide is that Galveston County is not alone. At the September SOS Election Law Conference, county clerks, voter registrars and election administrators from across Texas stood together in communicating to the EDSOS our concerns. Generally, no one could understand why a state agency with such impact on Texas voters prematurely went live in a system that was not ready and continues not be to ready for this election, for 21 million voter registration certificates being mailed out and for 2016 primary and presidential elections.
I have asked the head of the SOS Elections Division to notify other officials of potential issues and to speak to what is being done to correct them. I am still waiting for that communication. In the meantime, I will continue to work with them to correct those in Galveston County.
