Thursday, October 18, 2018

From the Texas Trubune: Did you register to vote in Texas before the deadline but can’t confirm it online? Here’s why.

Texas does not make it easy to vote, continued....

- Click here for the article.

The last-minute efforts to register people to vote by the 30-day deadline ahead of each election typically result in what local election officials have previously described as a paper tsunami.

Whether Texans drop their registration cards into a mailbox or sign up through a volunteer voter registrar, thousands of voter registration cards pour into local elections offices where county workers rush to process them in the short window between the registration deadline and the day Texans begin heading to the polls.

Because Texas does not allow for online voter registration, election officials verifying voter registration cards have to manually enter each new voter’s information into their local voter database — a time-consuming process that often leads to backlogs in the weeks before elections.

Election workers are left to decipher people’s handwriting, which can often be illegible, county workers say. And in some cases, prospective voters leave blanks in their applications, forcing officials to mail out individual notices about incomplete registrations so they can be resolved. When an application is complete, counties must then send the voter file to the secretary of state’s office, which then verifies and adds the voter to its statewide database.

For more:

- How a federal lawsuit could open the door to online voter registration in Texas.