With 96 percent of registered Travis County voters facing changes to their district or precincts, commissioners approved the use of vote centers for the November election.
House Bill 758, passed in 2005, permits counties to offer vote centers, also known as super precincts, instead of precinct polling locations. Unlike a neighborhood precinct polling location that requires a voter be registered at that particular location, these consolidated vote centers are open to any registered voter. Vote centers, however, are not permitted in primary elections, such as the upcoming May 29 election.
"Enough precincts were affected [by redistricting] that we would have had to buy more equipment in order to cover the additional polling places added as a result of redistricting," Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said. "That additional equipment would have cost about $500,000."
Redistricting maps for the U.S. Congress, the state House and state Senate have created the need to add 29 new precinct polling locations in Travis County, which has about 594,000 registered voters.
By having vote centers instead of adding neighborhood polling locations, DeBeauvoir said the county can save on resources as well as offer residents multiple options to cast their vote.
"We don't have to have voters to relearn individual precinct lines," she said. "They can stick with the polling places they are accustomed to all the way through the redistricting period. Nobody gets lost, nobody gets turned away because they can vote wherever it's convenient for them."
But Rosemary Edwards, Travis County Republican Party chairwoman, said she is concerned that the county is not interpreting the law correctly. She said she believes the law indicates that a county could have either neighborhood polling locations or vote centers but not both.
Travis County was part of a pilot program to use vote centers for the November 2011 constitutional amendment election. At an April 17 public hearing about the centers, DeBeauvoir said people expressed their approval of the centers. About 32 percent, or 9,516 of the 29,707 voters, used the vote centers instead of their designated polling places on election day.
DeBeauvoir said chances of voter fraud are reduced at the centers by using a real-time system that indicates if a voter has already voted to prevent people from attempting to vote at multiple vote centers.
Commissioner Sarah Eckhardt said although voter fraud is an issue, the the vote centers provide greater convenience for voters.
"In comparison to our low voter turnout and what is apparently disenfranchisement through confusion, I think those are bigger issues than the probabilities of voter fraud," she said.
