Collin County's elections office is asking commissioners on Monday to accept a small state grant tied to a problem county election workers across Texas have complained about for more than a year.
The item on the Commissioners Court agenda would accept special grant funding from the Texas Secretary of State's Office "for the processing of late-arriving DPS voter registration applications." The county auditor's note puts the award at $5,559.85. Those are registrations Texans submit through the Department of Public Safety, typically when they get or renew a driver license, that reached county offices late.
The court meets at 1:30 p.m. Nov. 9 on the fourth floor of the Jack Hatchell Administration Building, 2300 Bloomdale Road in McKinney.
State plans an audit
The request lands as state election officials acknowledge trouble with TEAM, the voter registration management system counties use to process records and track mail ballots. Votebeat, reporting with The Texas Tribune, said Saturday that the state posted a request for proposals on Wednesday for an independent audit of the system, which was overhauled in summer 2025.
According to Votebeat, an email from state elections director Christina Adkins to county officials said the audit will examine whether TEAM's modules work, what users need and whether the current system can be salvaged in the long run. It is expected to start in December so results are ready for the 2027 legislative session.
Adkins also wrote that working groups of county election administrators, clerks and tax assessor-collectors will begin meeting in December and January, and the state set up a ticketing system to track problems counties report.
County officials told Votebeat the system has been slow, crashes unexpectedly and cannot sort records by submission date. They said it made it harder to clear two backlogs of thousands of registration records the state created before Election Day.
