Errors in county voter rolls; elections official says problems ‘isolated’

McALLEN — Problems with voter registration information during last year’s transfer to the new state voter database have resurfaced.

McAllen City Commissioners Marcus Barrera and Aida Ramirez both recently received incorrect voter registration cards — the city district listed for Barrera was incorrect and Ramirez’s district wasn’t listed at all.

The discrepancies hark back to last year’s elections, in which slow computer servers and incomplete voter registration data for thousands of voters caused serious delays at polling stations across Texas.

“I don’t know (how widespread the discrepancies are in Hidalgo County) — we haven’t had an election yet,” Barrera said.

“If you take the (McAllen City Commission) as a sample, you got 30 percent that are misplaced in the wrong district.”

With the Texas presidential primary set for March 4, the county is expecting far greater turnout than in any of last year’s elections.

Hidalgo County Elections Administrator Teresa Navarro, who was notified of the problem in a letter from the city of McAllen last week, said the discrepancies were not part of a larger problem with the county’s database.

“We’re still working on the leftovers from TEAM,” she said, referring to glitches with the Texas Election Administration Management system — the statewide, state-maintained and -administered voter registration list developed to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002.

“But I think these are isolated,” she said of the recent problems with voter registration cards. “If anyone else sees they’re not in the correct precinct or district, they can call us.”

Hidalgo County switched to new voter registration software following last year’s debacle and currently has no plans to return to the state database — though it uploads voter information to the system each day.

Right now, of the 254 counties in Texas, 39 — most of which are larger counties — are not actively using the system, said Scott Haywood, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state, the chief election officer in the state.

“Over the summer we did a stress test where we almost ran a mock election across the state. It did what we wanted to do and isolated some of the problems with the hardware and the software,” he said. “The counties that are offline, I think a lot of them have taken a wait-and-see approach.”

While Hidalgo County’s new software has generally functioned well, Navarro said she had seen occasional errors in the new digital map that assigns voters’ precincts and districts based on global positioning system locations that correspond to their home addresses.

“With new subdivisions, we physically go out there and punch the coordinates into the GPS device,” she said. “In Marcus Barrera’s case, he was placed just a little north on the street indexing, so he had the incorrect district.”

Last May, countless voters arrived at polling stations across the county to find they were not assigned to a district or precinct and were thus unable to vote. Barrera, who was trying to vote in the McAllen city election, said while he persisted and eventually voted, there were plenty in line with him who did not.

“I like Teresa Navarro — I think she’s a good person — but she needs to get her office in order or we need to find someone else,” Barrera said. “It’s one of the most important rights we can protect: the people’s right to vote.”

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James Osborne covers McAllen and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4428.