Texas counties have cleared a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations that a state software error held up for almost a year, state election officials said Thursday. Early voting starts Monday.
A faulty update to the Department of Public Safety's online driver's license portal meant registrations and address changes submitted there were never sent on to county election offices. The records went back to October 2025. They finally reached the counties in September, shortly before the Oct. 5 registration deadline. Voting rights groups put the total at nearly 600,000, and Harris County alone had more than 75,000.
The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund sued DPS and the Secretary of State's office in Bexar County on Oct. 9. They want a judge to enforce a 2021 settlement that requires Texas to keep online registration through DPS reliable, and to order the state to hand over records on the failures.
"Now, before a critical midterm election, the state is in denial about issues with the DPS system despite knowing voters have already been impacted," said Karla Maradiaga of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which represents the plaintiffs.
Election officials say registrations submitted through the portal before the deadline are valid for the Nov. 3 election, even if they were processed late.
The scale is what shocks: nearly 600,000 records, some dating to October 2025, stuck in a software handoff that nobody was watching. Harris County alone — more than 75,000 voters — had to be rescued by hand, with overtime and spreadsheets.
And the lawsuit keeps the deeper question alive. The 2021 settlement was supposed to guarantee exactly this would not happen: a court ordered Texas to keep online registration reliable, and Texas agreed. Then, for eleven months, it wasn't. The backlog is cleared; the broken promise is still in court.
The machinery held — barely. Nearly 600,000 Texans did everything right, clicked the right boxes, and watched their registrations vanish into a software glitch for a year. Counties scrambled with overtime and spreadsheets, the backlog is cleared, and the ballots are valid. But the lawsuit is still alive, and it asks the question that will matter long after Nov. 3: how did nobody notice for eleven months?
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