The stakes are high. Although the state managed to find workarounds for the sluggish system during local elections in May, the constitutional amendment election in November and next year’s presidential election will place a far greater burden on the system.

“The public has zero tolerance for not being able to cast a vote if they’re legally entitled to it,” said Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt. “Hundreds of people were affected by these issues that we know of in the Southeast Texas area, but that number would jump to thousands or more in a November election.”

That’s why voter registrars around the state have taken to calling the test, scheduled for Aug. 6-10, a “stress test.”

Wilson’s office wants to simulate the load that the Texas Election Administration Management system, or TEAM, will handle during a presidential election cycle. He’s asking counties to use the system to log voter records at the same volume they would during the real thing.

“We need all 254 counties entering voter applications, calling and stressing the system at the same time, so we can see what will happen during a presidential election,” said Galveston County Tax Assessor-Collector Cheryl Johnson. “We could have 110,000 or 120,000 people vote (in the county), which is twice what you had” in the last midterm election.

Johnson was among a group of county officials around the state who were vocal critics of TEAM beginning soon after its January launch. Counties hired extra workers and had employees work odd and longer shifts to log voter records ahead of the May election — and there were still reports of delays at the polls.

In voter registration offices, transactions involving just a few records at a time that would normally take seconds to process were taking up to half an hour.

The hassle and expense was so great that some counties, including Tarrant, the largest county using TEAM, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to abandon the state system and purchase its own election management software.

Galveston County is now exploring similar options, though Johnson said the county wants to wait and see whether Wilson’s office and the TEAM developers can improve the system.

The state awarded a contract to IBM to develop TEAM after the Help America Vote Act, responding to problems with punch card ballots in the 2000 presidential election, required states to establish a central system to manage voter records.

John Keel, the state auditor, now has his staff examining TEAM. He said the audit was scheduled as part of routine procedure before anyone was aware of the scope of the problems. But reports of those problems may result in different testing approaches by his staff, he said.

It’s not clear how much the problems have cost the state financially. Keel said his office hasn’t arrived at a figure, and he won’t discuss details of the audit until a conclusive report comes out, probably in October.

Galveston County commissioners have sent a resolution to the secretary of state asking for reimbursement. Johnson said her budget for temporary workers, usually applied to a variety of tasks, has been spent almost entirely on voter registration because of difficulties with TEAM.

Even the counties using their own voter registration systems are having problems related to TEAM. These offline counties still have to interface with the system daily, sending voter records in bulk to Austin to comply with federal law.

One of the problems that affects even offline counties stems from TEAM’s street indexing program. Bettencourt said Harris County officials were shocked when they realized it had never occurred to TEAM’s designers that a place like Houston was adding new streets all the time.

“That was a programming function that they had not thought of at all,” Bettencourt said.

As a result, he and Johnson said, the system was unable to assign some voters to the proper precincts.

She said no one has been able to agree whether the problem is inherent in the system, or is the fault of county workers who input the data.

“From our standpoint, it’s at their end; from their standpoint, it’s at our end,” she said.

Efforts to reach IBM officials on Friday were not successful.

County officials report some improvements in response time since May, and say the secretary of state has been applying maximum pressure on the system developers to resolve problems. But even Wilson acknowledges it’s not performing the way it should.

At the urging of county officials, Wilson has asked that the August test include even the offline counties that simply import and export data to the system.

Wilson’s office is also accepting daily reports on TEAM’s performance from county officials, something Johnson said she and others requested.

“I’m hopeful they’re going to be really addressing the issues,” she said, pleased that Wilson called her to discuss TEAM on the day he was sworn into office. “The rest of it is just wait and see, because so far we haven’t seen a great number of changes.”

Former Secretary of State Roger Williams resigned in June, citing a desire to pursue other opportunities, which he did not name. Wilson is the second secretary of state to inherit TEAM and its troubles.

Wilson faces enormous pressures with November looming. The secretary of state serves not only as the chief elections officer, but also as the governor’s liaison on border and Mexican affairs, Texas’ chief protocol officer and the overseer of the state’s repository for business records. He also continues to serve as the leader of Gov. Rick Perry’s Office of Economic Development and Tourism.

Even with all of those duties, TEAM is a top priority, Wilson said.

“It is vital that we get an assessment of the system’s performance well in advance of an election,” he said in statement.

Typical voter turnout for a local election is less than 10 percent, Bettencourt said. It’s 20 to 30 percent in a November midterm election, and as high as 60 percent in a presidential election.

“This test will not be a perfect test of what happens,” he said. “But at least it’s a lot better than sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem.”