The Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector’s office, led by Celia Israel, received more than 32,000 registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety about two weeks before the Oct. 5 registration deadline. DPS routinely collects voter-registration applications, but a system error left applications unprocessed and unsent to county registrars.

Israel’s staff worked overtime and cleared the backlog by Oct. 9. The unexpected work delayed processing of the usual last-minute wave of paper applications. Texas does not offer online voter registration, Israel said, and about 20,000 paper applications were pushed back while staff handled the DPS data.

Some of the applications were more than a year old. Israel said it was unclear how many people who had tried to register may have been unable to vote in the March primary. She also said DPS had not provided counties with a full explanation for the failure, beyond referring to software problems.

The backlog is part of a wider dispute: voting-rights groups are suing the state over the unprocessed applications. Israel said her office had to focus on addressing the immediate workload, while also warning that the added data had clogged the registration process.

Travis County has nearly 1 million registered voters, including 138,342 on the state’s suspense list, according to the Texas Secretary of State. A suspense-list designation does not prevent someone from voting; voters can generally resolve it by providing a statement of residence. Israel said county staff had removed about 5,000 voters from the list over one recent weekend and continued working through the remaining cases.

The county is also contending with problems in TEAM 2.0, the state-run system used to manage voter records and mail ballots. County Clerk Dyana Limon-Mercado said the upgraded software was still lagging and malfunctioning days before early voting began.

One issue arises when the county transfers the official voter list from TEAM to its electronic poll books. Limon-Mercado said thousands of eligible voters were missing from the transferred list, forcing staff to find the discrepancies and add voters back manually.

The new system has also eliminated a bulk-upload function for recording when requested mail ballots are sent. Previously, staff could update more than 17,000 records in about 10 minutes. Now, Limon-Mercado said, each record takes about two minutes to update. The county expects to process roughly 30,000 mail ballots this election.

The extra work means longer hours for county staff, Limon-Mercado said, and the state is not paying the added costs. She said her office was contacting the Secretary of State’s Office multiple times a day about the software problems. While she described communication with staff as adequate, she raised concerns about leadership and the impact on county voters.

The registration backlog has been cleared, but the software issues and continuing voter-record checks leave county election workers managing additional tasks as voting continues. The county’s ability to keep voter lists accurate and process ballots on time will matter to residents relying on local election offices to make their votes count.