There’s a new online tracking system for Texas voters who are voting by mail this year. The service, which is being offered by Vote America, allows mail voters to check whether their ballot has been received by county election administrators.
Many other states offer this same service on a statewide basis, but Texas does not provide voters with the ability to track each step of the vote-by-mail process. For this year’s election, some Texas counties have implemented comprehensive mail ballot tracking systems that provide information from the point of application to the completed ballot being received, but most have not.
Using the Vote America online tool, a voter can learn whether their mail ballot was received by their county elections office, but they cannot find out about other steps in the vote-by-mail process, such as whether their application for a mail ballot was received, when their ballot was mailed to them, or whether their ballot was accepted and counted.
“We cannot overlook the fact that here in Texas, the secretary of state is failing to offer a critical public service and a nonpartisan organization has been forced to step in to fill that gap,” said Texas Democratic Party Deputy Executive Director Cliff Walker. “To be clear, it should be the role of the State of Texas to provide this level of transparency to its voters, however, in absence of that, we are pleased that Vote America has stepped up.”
Here are links for accessing the mail ballot tracking systems offered by Texas’ largest counties:
- Bexar County
- Dallas County does not have an online tracking system, but you can email the election office to ask about the status of your mail ballot.
- Harris County
- Tarrant County (Video instructions are available here.)
- Travis County (Scroll down to the voter lookup section.)
If you do not live in one of the counties listed above, you can find out whether your county has a mail ballot tracking system by doing a search on your county’s election site using the words “mail ballot tracking.”
The state of Texas does offer mail ballot tracking for military and overseas voters.
