Voter registration applications that Texans filed through the Department of Public Safety’s online driver’s license portal as far back as October 2025 never reached the county officials who process them, and counties are now working through the backlog less than two weeks before the October 5 registration deadline. The Secretary of State’s elections division told county officials on September 22 that “certain voter registration records from online DPS transactions were incomplete, which resulted in these files not being transmitted to the counties for review.”
The state has not said how many Texans were affected. Officials in seven of the state’s 254 counties have confirmed receiving more than 178,000 backlogged records combined, according to a count by Votebeat and the Texas Tribune: more than 68,000 in Dallas County, 40,000 in Collin, 32,000 in Travis, 18,000 in Williamson, 8,200 in Hays, 7,400 in Lubbock and 4,500 in Cameron. The records include new registrations as well as updates such as address changes, and some of the people involved may have registered another way since.
The counties found it first. Election officials noticed a surge of older DPS applications arriving in TEAM, the state’s voter registration system. On September 16 the elections division told them it was “actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records” and had asked Civix, the vendor that built TEAM, to pull the files from county dashboards. Six days later the state began sending the affected records to the counties overnight.
Counties that work directly in TEAM will not see an old DPS record for any voter who has filed a newer update, because the state withheld those. Counties that use outside vendors received every record, and the state told them it was “not able to perform the same analysis that we did for online counties.” Those offices must check each record themselves so that an old application does not overwrite a voter’s newer one.
A voter who applied through the DPS portal but does not appear on the rolls can still vote. “A voter who registered through DPS online services but does not appear on the rolls can cast a provisional ballot,” Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office, told Votebeat. “If that voter did register, the provisional vote will be counted.” Early voting begins October 19, and Election Day is November 3.
DPS has said the error is resolved and has not explained its cause. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, told Votebeat that the Secretary of State’s office should have noticed the missing files, since it oversees the system counties use to receive them. “They should have caught it,” he said.
The portal is one of the main ways Texans register. About 6 million used it to register from 2020 through 2024, DPS officials told lawmakers in 2025, according to Votebeat.
Every link that broke belongs to Texas. A state agency took the applications, and a state system was supposed to carry them to the counties. How the records went missing for a year, and how many Texans they belong to, are questions for Austin to answer before the deadline passes.
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