A software glitch left nearly 600,000 Texas voter registrations unsent, and counties cleared most of the backlog days before early voting

The voters did everything right. The system lost the paperwork.

Texans who renew a driver licence or change an address online through the Department of Public Safety are asked whether they want to register to vote at the same time, an arrangement Texas agreed to in a 2021 settlement of a federal motor voter lawsuit. About 6 million Texans have used the process. According to a lawsuit filed on October 9 in Bexar County, a programming error meant that for months the registrations of people who said yes were never transmitted to the secretary of state's office for distribution to county registrars. The people affected were given receipts showing the step completed. Some of the delayed registrations date back to October 2025, and the total backlog reached nearly 600,000.

The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund sued Secretary of State Robert Howden, DPS Director Freeman Martin and their agencies, arguing the failure breaches the 2021 settlement. The filing cites internal emails showing DPS acknowledged in March that a programming change by a vendor working with the state's Department of Information Resources stopped online registration selections from being transmitted between December 2025 and February 2026. DPS records cited in the suit show 992 voter inquiries during the primary election period involved transactions completed while the error was in effect. The suit also points to a July 2025 overhaul of the state's voter registration system that county officials said caused its own processing delays. The groups seek no damages. They want a permanent injunction requiring the state to process registrations correctly going forward and to show evidence of compliance.

The timing is what turned a software failure into a national story. Early voting in Texas begins on Monday, October 19, and the state is holding one of the year's most competitive Senate races, between Attorney General Ken Paxton and James Talarico. Senator Alex Padilla of California, the senior Democrat on the Senate committee that oversees federal elections, wrote to Governor Greg Abbott and to Howden last month demanding an explanation of the scope and cause of the failure.

County election officials told reporters the backlog appeared to have been mostly cleared by Wednesday, and several said there was little risk that Texans who tried to register would be unable to vote. Voting advocates answered that a cleared backlog does not repair the discouragement of voters who discover at the polls that the state mishandled a registration they completed a year ago. Both things can be true at once, and in Texas this month, both are.