Abbott Must Take Responsibility for Texas’ Voter Registration Mess

DALLAS, TX —Texas voters deserve answers about what appears to be serious negligence by the state officials responsible for our elections. New reporting from Votebeat shows that the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Secretary of State’s Office were warned months ago that the state’s online voter registration system was failing, yet the problems continued, leaving county election officials scrambling to process a massive backlog of voter registration records just weeks before Election Day. 

Governor Abbott, this is your administration’s mess, and Texas voters and local election officials are the ones paying the price. Your Secretary of State’s election system has been plagued by problems for more than a year, and your decision to force an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting added another layer of complexity to an election system that was already struggling. Texas Democrats have seen these failures firsthand and have had to work with Secretary of State staff and manually correct voter-file data just to make sure voters and campaigns have accurate information. Now county clerks and elections administrators in communities across Texas are being forced to work around the clock to clean up a DPS failure that state officials knew about months ago.

Governor Abbott should stop passing the buck and take responsibility. He should immediately provide county election offices with the staff, technical assistance and resources they need to process every affected record accurately and on time, and he should give Texans a full accounting of what state officials knew, when they knew it, and why this problem was allowed to continue. Texans should not have to wonder whether their government did its job when they took the basic step of registering to vote.