Texas Election System Undergoing Architectural, Data Changes

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office is working on architectural changes to the state’s voter registration and election management system after a rollout complicated by a third-party vendor failure, redistricting and continuing problems with reporting and data synchronization.

Christina Adkins, elections director for the Secretary of State’s Office, detailed the work Aug. 3 during a House Committee on Elections hearing examining voter registration systems and technology used in elections.

The Texas Election Administration Management system, known as TEAM, is the statewide voter registration and election management platform. The latest version went live July 11, 2025, after a procurement process that began in 2023. Civix was selected to build and service the system, Adkins told lawmakers.

The rollout encountered an unexpected problem about two weeks later when VOTEC, a separate vendor used by 24 Texas counties, experienced financial difficulties. Some counties using VOTEC’s cloud-based platform eventually lost access to their data and could not process voter registrations, Adkins said.

Ultimately, 11 counties needed to move into TEAM. Adkins said that process would normally take two to three months for each county, but the state had about six weeks to complete the work for all 11.

“We had to stop the redevelopment of our system. We had to stop everything,” Adkins said.

She told the committee that the state spent about $660,000 onboarding the 11 counties. About 2 million registered voters were affected by the transition, she said.

Once that work was completed, another development affected the project. Congressional redistricting required changes involving 73 counties ahead of the 2026 primary, Adkins said. The state had not anticipated needing its redistricting module at that stage of TEAM’s development.

The Secretary of State’s Office is now using the summer to resume broader improvements to the platform.

Adkins identified reporting as one of the areas that has caused the most difficulty. Certain reports currently require Civix developers to conduct back-end data pulls rather than allowing state users to generate them directly, she said. That process has increased costs, taken additional time and contributed to a backlog of data requests.

“This has been identified as a priority order for Civix to make sure that our reporting capabilities are built out the way we need them built out,” Adkins said.

The office is also conducting what Adkins described as a “massive data review” involving counties that use third-party voter registration systems. Those counties maintain their own systems for day-to-day work but submit information to the statewide database.

Adkins said the state has brought additional data personnel onto the project and introduced a synchronization process that allows those counties to conduct a full-field database sync with TEAM to identify discrepancies. Dallas County was the first to go through the process, she said.

The agency is also considering bringing in consultants to evaluate the broader system.

“We are looking at some other things that we can do to bring some consultants in to evaluate the system as a whole to make sure that the system that we have is meeting the needs of our state,” Adkins told the committee.

Additional development includes geographic information system capabilities intended to replace some of the manual work counties perform when assigning districts to individual street segments. Adkins said a map-based approach could make redistricting and voter assignment work more precise and less labor-intensive.

The office is also developing a secure electronic ballot-delivery system for eligible military and overseas voters. The system would provide authenticated links for voters to download ballot materials rather than sending ballot files directly by email. Completed ballots would still have to be returned in hard copy.

Adkins said larger architectural changes underway this summer are intended to improve system speed, reporting and data indexing.

“In the next two to three weeks, I think our counties are going to start seeing significant improvements in those areas,” she said.

The committee’s interim charge also calls for examining the effect of maintaining multiple voter registration software systems across Texas and recommending ways to streamline voter roll maintenance ahead of the next legislative session.