Texas Clears a Year-Old Voter Registration Backlog Days Before Early Voting

Texas Clears a Year-Old Voter Registration Backlog Days Before Early Voting

A state portal left half a million records off the rolls

Texas county election officials said this week that a backlog of voter registration applications and updates — stuck for more than a year because of a state software error — has been cleared. The records came through the Texas Department of Public Safety's online driver's license portal, where Texans who renew a license or change an address can simultaneously register to vote. The records never reached the county registrars that process them. The state acknowledged sending counties at least 500,000 delayed records, some dating to October 2025; the voting rights groups now suing Texas put the figure at nearly 600,000.

DPS blames a vendor's October 2025 update

DPS says the failure traces to an October 2025 software update by a third-party vendor whose software handles batch transactions. The agency says it discovered the problem on its own in late August, investigated, and fixed the defect on Sept. 13. The secretary of state's office received large files of affected records around Sept. 14 and began relaying them to counties. But The Texas Tribune, citing records, reported that DPS had been told about registration problems back in March, and officials have not explained why the fix and the data transfer took weeks longer. Votebeat first reported the backlog on Sept. 22 — two weeks before the Oct. 5 registration deadline.

Counties had ten days to do a year's work

The timeline is the crux. Records stopped flowing in October 2025; the defect was repaired on Sept. 13, 2026. State officials began manually distributing archived files to local election offices late on the night of Sept. 22, leaving administrators a little over a week before the Oct. 5 cutoff. Texas has 254 counties. The Texas Association of County Election Officials said counties received anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of records.

Big counties finished in a week; small ones counted hundreds

The volumes varied enormously. Harris County received about 75,000 records, Dallas County roughly 40,000 (the lawsuit says Dallas later received about 68,000), Bexar County more than 45,000 and Travis County more than 35,000. Smaller counties such as Live Oak handled 148 records; Hockley County about 350. Dallas, Harris and others got through the backlog within a week. Harris confirmed all 75,000 records were processed by Oct. 6; Travis announced its 35,000 were done on Oct. 9. On Oct. 14 both the secretary of state's office and the county election officials' association said the backlog had been cleared.

The state's message: if you registered on time, you can vote

Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, told NBC News that anyone who registered by the Oct. 5 deadline is eligible to vote in the Nov. 3 election, even if the application was processed later — the effective date of the registration is the date of the DPS transaction. A voter who shows up and is missing from the rolls can cast a provisional ballot, which officials count after checking DPS transaction logs. The secretary of state's office has also offered counties grant funding to offset overtime and vendor costs.

Voting rights groups take Texas back to court

This week the League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund sued DPS, the secretary of state's office and their top officials in Bexar County's 224th District Court, asking a judge to order both agencies to maintain a functioning registration process, produce records documenting the failures, and show proof of compliance within a month. The suit alleges the state has breached a 2021 settlement — Stringer v. Hughs — that guaranteed Texans the right to register through the DPS online portal, and says the breach has continued since at least October 2025. "Texas agreed in court to make this form of online voter registration through DPS work, and then failed to deliver," said Mia Balderas, interim executive director of MOVE Texas Civic Fund.

Civil rights lawyers cite federal registration law

On Oct. 8 the Southern Poverty Law Center sent the secretary of state a notice letter on behalf of several organizations, arguing Texas violated Sections 8(a)(1) and 5 of the National Voter Registration Act by failing to ensure that eligible applicants who submitted valid registrations on time were registered and that DPS transmitted applications promptly.

Counties' own systems made the catch-up harder

The cleanup was complicated by the state's own registration platform. Counties rely daily on the Texas Election Administration Management system, known as TEAM, to maintain their lists and run elections. The county election officials' association said officials continue to hit widespread functionality problems and blamed what it called "fundamental system architecture failures" by Civix, the state's voter registration database vendor. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt said he began asking oversight questions in June.

The fallout lands on a close Senate race

The stakes are immediate. Texas votes Nov. 3 in a midterm that features a competitive U.S. Senate race. Early voting runs Oct. 19 through Oct. 30, and Oct. 23 is the deadline for mail ballot applications to be received. About 80 percent of Texas votes in 2024 were cast early.

What voters should do now

County and state officials are urging Texans to verify their registration status — through the secretary of state's lookup or by calling their county election office. A registration card is not required at the polls; a photo ID is. The lawsuit is still moving: DPS and the secretary of state's office are expected to respond, and a judge will decide whether the registration failures breached the state's 2021 settlement. County officials say they will keep monitoring their rolls to make sure the poll lists are complete before Nov. 3.