Voting Groups Sue Texas Over 500,000 Voter Registrations Stuck at DPS

Two voting groups have sued the Texas secretary of state and the Texas Department of Public Safety, saying hundreds of thousands of voter registrations submitted through the department’s online driver’s license portal never reached county election offices. The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund filed the suit on October 9 in Bexar County’s 224th District Court. Early voting for the November 3 election begins October 19.

The groups say the state has broken a 2021 settlement that requires it to let Texans register to vote, or update their registration, when they renew a driver’s license or change their address online. “Since at least October 2025, Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract,” the petition says.

What went wrong

According to the petition, the department failed to send almost 600,000 voter registrations to the secretary of state’s office as of September 22, some of them dating back to October 2025. The department and the secretary of state’s office sent county election officials a backlog of at least 500,000 records last month, delayed by a software error in the department’s web portal, The Texas Tribune reported. Election officials told the Tribune that problems with the state’s voter registration system, known as TEAM, have made the backlog harder to clear.

The petition says about six million Texans have used the online process since 2020. It describes a League member in San Antonio who updated her address online in August, chose to update her voter registration at the same time, and six weeks later was still registered at her old address, in a different precinct.

What the groups want

The groups are not seeking money. They ask the court for a permanent injunction ordering the two agencies to run the online registration process as the settlement requires, and to produce the records the settlement obliges them to keep on applicants who asked to register and were not.

The settlement grew out of a 2020 federal case in San Antonio, in which a judge ordered Texas to offer online registration through the department’s website under the National Voter Registration Act’s “Motor Voter” provisions. The Texas Democratic Party and two Democratic campaign committees intervened in that case as plaintiffs, the petition notes. The state settled in July 2021, and the agreement has no end date.

The department and the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to the Tribune’s request for comment.

The backlog is a Texas agency’s failure, and it will be argued in a Texas courtroom. The rule at its center, that a driver’s license transaction must double as a voter registration, comes from a federal statute.