Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.Tens of thousands of voter registration applications, some dating back at least a year, are caught in a backlog and have yet to be processed due to an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety, the leader of an association of county election officials said Wednesday.Texas Democrats, who are fiercely contesting key offices in closely watched races this year, are calling on Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to investigate the problem, which was first reported by Votebeat.Some voter registration applications and updates submitted through DPS’s online driver’s license portal were never sent to county voter registrars, the state told county election officials. DPS has not responded to requests for comment about what caused the issue or the exact scope of the problem. The state began delivering the unsent registrations to county officials Tuesday night. Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said the organization is still gathering numbers from its members but that he expects large counties to be hit the hardest with additional applications.Voter registrars have told the association they’ve received anywhere from a few hundred voter registration applications to process in small counties to tens of thousands of applications and updates in the most populous counties, McGinn said in a statement Wednesday. “We cannot provide specific numbers of these records for specific counties, because by the time I send this e-mail the numbers will have gone up — and will continue to go up throughout the day today,” he wrote.The secretary of state’s office became aware of the problem last week, when election officials flagged that they’d noticed a surge in “older” voter registration applications coming from DPS in TEAM, the state’s voter registration system. Votebeat previously reported that state officials said the affected transactions produced incomplete voter registration records, which prevented them from being transmitted to county registrars. Officials have not said what information was missing, what caused the records to be incomplete, how many voters were affected, or exactly when the problem began.These records go back as far as October 2025, which means counties are now dealing with nearly a year of backlogged voter registration tasks to process. They could include new registrations or simply updates to voters’ existing records, like a change in address.It’s not clear how many registrations were new versus address updates, or whether the error prevented any voter from casting a ballot in the March primary election. The issue has “increased the administrative burden on officials who have been kind of staying on top of things,” McGinn said during a webinar for reporters Wednesday. Smaller jurisdictions will have to try to work fast with fewer resources, he said. “There’s going to be a lot of counties that are paying a lot of overtime,” he said. State Rep. John Bucy, a Democrat from Austin, and vice chair of the Texas House Elections Committee, on Wednesday called on Abbott to “immediately commit whatever state resources and funding counties need to process every one of these applications accurately and on time.”“It is absolutely outrageous that, in the run-up to one of the most consequential midterm elections in decades, Texans have had their voter registrations impacted by a failure at the Texas Department of Public Safety,” Bucy said in a statement responding to Votebeat’s initial reporting. “County election officials are now being asked to clean up the state’s mess at one of the busiest times of the election season. They have to process this backlog on top of the surge in registrations we always see before the deadline, while ensuring older DPS records don’t overwrite more recent voter information.”In an email, Abbott’s office referred inquiries to DPS and the secretary of state’s office.James Talarico, a Democrat running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate, encouraged Texans to check their voter registration. “Texans follow the rules, register to vote before the deadline, and still risk losing their God-given right to the ballot box because their government failed to do its job,” he said.State officials said voters who don’t appear on the rolls because of this error can still ask to cast a provisional ballot, and election officials will count it once they confirm the voter had registered via DPS by the appropriate deadline. To check the status of your voter registration contact your county election official. You can find a list by county here.Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
