The Texas Secretary of State’s office rolled out a massive overhaul of its election management system in July. Five months later, county party officials across Texas are scrambling to assemble primary ballots with incomplete candidate lists—and third-party candidates remain completely invisible in the state’s portal.
Welcome to another chapter in the ongoing saga of Texas relying on federal mandates and out-of-state technology vendors to run its elections.
A Perfect Storm of Incompetence
The Texas Election Administration Management system—TEAM—has been a headache for county officials since its inception in the early 2000s. The system was built to satisfy requirements under the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, developed and maintained by Civix, a Louisiana-based vendor. That’s right: Texas entrusts its election infrastructure to a company headquartered in Baton Rouge.
In July 2025, Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s office pushed through a complete system overhaul. The project involved migrating more than 20 million voter records and training over 2,500 users. The timing? Months before the December 8 filing deadline for the March 2026 primaries.
The results have been predictable.
A September survey by the Texas Association of County Election Officials found that a “substantial portion” of users found TEAM’s core functionalities—particularly voter registration features—to be “difficult or not functioning.” By October, county election officials sent a letter to Nelson asking her office to halt any further system rollout and resolve existing problems. That letter warned of “substantial delays in processing voter registration applications” and noted the system was “incorrectly generating the voter registration list.”
In Bexar County, the situation turned critical. The county had been using Votec Corporation’s software for voter registration, but that vendor collapsed in August after demanding emergency surcharges from counties across Texas. Dallas County got hit with a $66,000 invoice. Collin County faced over $40,000. When Votec shut down, Bexar County had no choice but to migrate to TEAM—right in the middle of the state’s botched rollout.
The county ended up with a backlog of approximately 52,000 voter registration applications.
Candidate Lists Missing in Action
As local party officials met with the Bexar County Elections Department this month to review sample ballots, the problems became even more apparent. The candidate portal was experiencing significant delays. Complete candidate lists still weren’t finalized. Many candidates believed to have filed for office—particularly Republican congressional candidates—were still missing from the system.
The parties have been forced to work around the state’s failures. The Texas Democratic Party used Google Docs to make candidate lists available to the public. The Republican Party of Texas posted its list on its website. County parties shared their local candidate lists directly with media outlets because the official state system couldn’t get the job done.
Third Parties Left in the Dark
While Republicans and Democrats scramble to work around TEAM’s failures, third-party candidates face an even worse situation: they don’t exist in the system at all.
JR Haseloff, chair of the Libertarian Party of Bexar County, told the San Antonio Report: “We’ve been fighting Secretary of State to open this up to third parties, but it has not been updated yet.”
Libertarian candidates filed by the same December 8 deadline as their major-party counterparts, but they won’t appear on the Secretary of State’s public portal until after their state convention in April 2026. The system simply wasn’t built with them in mind.
Independent candidates face an even more grueling path. They can file declarations of intent during the same window, but can’t gather petition signatures until after the March primaries. They must collect those signatures exclusively from registered voters who didn’t participate in either party’s primary, leaving about a month to qualify for the November ballot.
Jason Wolff, running as an independent candidate for Bexar County District Attorney, put the disparity plainly: “Republicans and Democrats, all they have to do is pony up the money, and they’re on the ballot. An independent has to wait until after the primaries to get 500 signatures from qualified voters who did not vote in either primary.”
The Secretary of State’s office says independent candidates will be added to public lists once they’ve collected signatures and qualified for the ballot. Until then, they remain invisible.
Redistricting Chaos Compounds the Problem
The TEAM meltdown collided with another political firestorm: mid-decade congressional redistricting ordered by Governor Abbott at President Trump’s request. The new map aimed to give Republicans control of 30 of Texas’s 38 congressional districts, up from 25.
A federal three-judge panel in El Paso blocked the new map on November 18, finding that challengers were likely to prove it violated the Constitution by discriminating against voters based on race. Four days before the filing deadline, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, allowing Texas to use the new map for 2026.
The legal whiplash sent candidates scrambling. Rep. Chip Roy announced he’d run for Texas Attorney General instead of seeking reelection in the redrawn CD-21, creating an open seat that drew more than a dozen Republican candidates. Rep. Greg Casar announced plans to run in the new Austin-based CD-37 instead of the redrawn CD-35, leaving that race open as well.
Many of these candidates—particularly Republicans from outside Bexar County—didn’t appear on the Secretary of State’s portal until the final week before the deadline. Party chairs had to rely on their own records and direct communication with state party officials rather than the official system.
Federal Funding, Federal Problems
Here’s what the Austin establishment won’t tell you about TEAM: it exists because the federal government told Texas to build it.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 authorized approximately $3.86 billion in federal funding for states to meet new mandates—including requirements for statewide voter registration databases. Texas has received tens of millions in HAVA funds over the years. In 2018, the state got $23.3 million. In 2020, another $26 million.
The 2025 Texas Legislature noted that the Secretary of State’s office had accumulated a large fund balance from federal HAVA grants being carried over multiple budget cycles. But all that federal money hasn’t bought a functioning system. It’s bought dependency on out-of-state vendors, compliance with federal mandates, and recurring failures that leave county officials and candidates scrambling.
This is the same office that withdrew Texas from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) in October 2023—the ninth state to leave the multistate voter list maintenance organization. Secretary Nelson cited cost increases and objections to ERIC rules requiring states to identify and notify eligible unregistered voters. Texas signed voter roll crosscheck agreements with nine other states as a replacement and began developing an in-house crosscheck program.
The withdrawal from ERIC was a step toward Texas controlling its own systems. But as long as the state remains dependent on federal funding and out-of-state technology vendors for core election infrastructure, problems like the TEAM meltdown will keep happening.
What This Means for Texans
For supporters of Texas independence, the TEAM fiasco offers another lesson in why self-governance matters. A state with a $2.7 trillion GDP—larger than Canada’s—shouldn’t be dependent on Louisiana software vendors and federal grant money to run its elections. A state with 30 million people shouldn’t have a voter registration system that county officials describe as “difficult or not functioning.”
If Texas can’t even manage a candidate filing portal without complete chaos, imagine what happens when the stakes get higher. Imagine a contested statewide election—or a TEXIT referendum—running through this same broken infrastructure.
The system wasn’t built for Texas. It was built for federal compliance. And Texans are paying the price.
