The State Says the Voter Roll System Fell Short. Show the Audit.

The state built one computer system to run every voter roll in Texas. Now the state says it has not done the job. Good. Now show us the audit.

Plain English summary

TEAM is the system the Texas Secretary of State uses to run voter registration. Counties use it to add voters, update records, and process mail ballots.

According to Votebeat, co-published by the Texas Tribune on November 7, state officials now admit TEAM "hasn't met performance expectations." County election workers have complained for more than a year that it runs slow, quits on them, and makes simple work hard. The state posted a request for an independent audit and says county working groups start meeting in December and January.

The election is over. This is the right time to fix it. It is also the right time to watch.

Why it matters

Your vote starts with your registration.

If the record is wrong, slow, or stuck in a backlog, the problem lands on a clerk in a county office. In East Texas that is a small staff in Gregg, Smith, Harrison, Upshur, and Marion counties. They do not get to blame Austin when a voter walks up and the record is not right. They just have to make it work.

When a system makes those folks mark mail ballot records one at a time, that is not a tech problem. That is a trust problem.

The receipt

• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: TEAM was upgraded and rolled out in the summer of 2025. It was built by Civix, a Louisiana company. (Votebeat)
• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: Election officials reported the system is slow, quits unexpectedly, will not sort by date submitted, and forces some mail ballot records to be marked one at a time. Some counties use workarounds. (Votebeat)
• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: Counties worked through two state-created backlogs of thousands of registration records before Election Day. (Texas Tribune)
• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: The state's audit request, posted November 4, says "continued areas of concern pose a direct risk" to officials meeting their legal duties. The audit is set to start in December so results are ready for the 2027 session. Its scope includes the "long-term salvageability" of the system. (Votebeat)
• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: Secretary of State Robert Howden said in a release that the state ran "multiple successful statewide elections" on TEAM and has "learned a great deal." He said the state will seek county input. (Texas Tribune)
• DOCUMENTED INFERENCE: Elections director Christina Adkins told counties in an email about a new ticketing system to track TEAM problems and working groups of county election administrators, clerks, and tax assessor-collectors. (Votebeat)
• FACT: The state posts official November 3, 2026 general election results at the Secretary of State's results site. (Texas SOS Election Results)
• NEEDS AUTHENTICATION: The audit request itself. I have read the reporting on it, not the document. When I get the posted RFP, I will put it here.

What Ryan says

I am not going to pretend this is a scandal. It is not.

It is a system that did not work the way it was sold. And the state said so out loud. I give them credit for that.

But credit is not the finish line. The finish line is the audit report, in public, in plain English.

Here is what I want to see.

Publish the audit when it is done. All of it. Not a summary. Not a press release that says "lessons learned."

Tell us what the contract cost and what the state got for the money.

Put county clerks in the working groups who actually use the thing every day. Put small counties at the table, not just Harris and Dallas. East Texas runs elections with a handful of people. Their time matters.

And whatever comes out of this, make it work the same for every voter. Same county, opposite rule is not how we run an election. One system, one standard, open books.

Show me the evidence. Then fix it.

What this does not prove

This does not prove any vote was lost.

It does not prove any election result was wrong. Nothing in the reporting says that, and I am not going to say it either.

It does not prove fraud by anyone. Slow software is not a crime.

It does not prove which counties were hit hardest. The reporting names no East Texas county and gives no count of voters affected.

What it does prove

The state's own officials say the voter registration system fell short.

The state is paying for an outside audit that will ask if the system can even be saved.

County election workers carried the weight of it through a statewide election.

And the report is due before lawmakers meet in 2027, which means it should be on the table in public before any money moves.

The bottom line

The people who run your elections told the state the tool was broken. The state finally agreed.

Now the record needs to be finished. Audit, findings, cost, fix. In public.

This is the record. Put eyes on it.

Do not threaten anyone. Do not harass anyone. Do not contact anyone in my name. Read it. Share it. Send receipts, evidence, witnesses. Put eyes on the record.