Brennan Center for Justice

Texas currently has the Electronic Registration at DMVs component of Voter Registration Modernization in place. Texas also has electronic pollbooks in at least one county.

The excerpt below was adapted from an appendix to the 2010 report Voter Registration in a Digital Age.

• Background
  Approximately ten years ago, branch offices of Texas’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) began electronically transmitting to election officials the voter registration data they collect from their customers. These transmissions did not include a signature, and DPS officials continued to mail election officials pre-populated registration forms which they would print and ask applicants to sign. The DPS began fully upgrading its computer system in 2009 with the goal of reducing as much as possible the amount of paperwork it presents to customers.

  This was a welcome development to state election officials, who for some time had been considering the move to a paperless registration process for DPS visitors. According to Elections Director Ann McGeehan, many county officials, particularly those in larger counties, encouraged this development. Officials began introducing paperless registration into DPS offices in May 2009, and completed the process in May 2010. Election officials have not encountered any problems with the new system, and Ms. McGeehan does not believe that developing and operating it have created any significant costs for her department.
   

• Outcomes
  Ms. McGeehan notes that automation offers a far more reliable means of transferring registrations than existed before. In the past, DPS offices usually mailed all the registration forms they collected to the election office of the county in which they were located, even though not all their customers necessarily lived in the same county. This naturally complicated the task of election officials, as did the fact that they occasionally received sets of registration data for which the forms—and the required signatures—never arrived. Such problems have not occurred with the new system.
   
• How Electronic Registration at DPS Sites Works in Texas
  A visitor does business with the DPS by going through an interview with an employee, at the end of which she signs an electronic signature pad. The employee will ask the visitor if she would like to register to vote or to update an existing registration; if so, the employee flags her registration so that the information required by election officials will automatically be collected, along with the digitized signature, and sent to the statewide voter registration database system. This system then sorts the applications by county and provides them to the appropriate local officials for review.

In the past, Texas has considered the following VRM-related legislation:

• Election Day Registration. This bill would have established Election Day registration (EDR).  The bill would have allowed an eligible citizen to register and vote on Election Day if the citizen submits a voter registration application and presents proof of ID. The bill would have charged the Secretary of State with providing the necessary procedure to implement EDR in Texas elections. (H.B. 179)

• Online Registration. This bill would establish online voter registration. (H.B. 2814)