Overview
- Election officials said a wrong file uploaded to the county’s poll‑book system caused the electronic check‑in to fail across all Fort Bend voting centers on Tuesday afternoon.
- The outage began about 3:30 p.m. and forced officials to pause normal operations until partial fixes were put in place and voting resumed after a roughly two‑hour interruption.
- Where the system was unavailable, some voters were still checked in manually and others were offered provisional ballots so they could cast a vote that will be verified later.
- Fort Bend staff have been working with the system vendor to diagnose and fix the problem but gave no estimate for a full restoration and said the incident has not sacrificed vote integrity.
- Poll books are the electronic lists used to verify and check voters in at each precinct, so outages slow throughput, may increase wait times, and can trigger post‑election review of provisional ballots.