Texas DPS Error Left Tens of Thousands of Voter Registrations Unprocessed Since Last October

Texas election officials are scrambling to clear a backlog of tens of thousands of voter registration applications after discovering the state's Department of Public Safety failed to forward them to county registrars, in some cases for nearly a year.

The problem was first reported by Votebeat, the nonpartisan election-administration news outlet, and confirmed by the Texas secretary of state's office to county officials last week. Certain voter registration applications and updates submitted through DPS's online driver's license portal, the only way Texans can register to vote online, were never transmitted to the counties responsible for processing them, according to the Texas Tribune and Texas Standard.

DPS said in a statement that certain online records were "incomplete and not fully transmitted" to the secretary of state's office and that "the system issue has been resolved." The agency did not respond to questions from the Texas Tribune or the Associated Press about what caused the failure or its exact scope.

County election officials say the numbers are large. Bexar County, home to San Antonio, received about 45,000 backlogged applications, according to NBC News and the Associated Press, as carried by Breitbart and KRGV. Travis County received more than 35,000, Collin County is reviewing more than 40,000, and Dallas County reported roughly 40,000, according to Democracy Docket. One local reporter estimated the statewide total could reach 750,000, a figure Democracy Docket noted has not been confirmed by the state.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said during a Wednesday press briefing that his group is still collecting numbers from members and expects large, fast-growing urban counties to be hit hardest. "This is really out of left field," McGinn said, according to the Associated Press. "Knowing that this one element of state applications didn't come through, and we had no insight on it."

The timeline is significant. According to the Associated Press and Democracy Docket, the failure traces back to October 2025, meaning it may have affected Texans trying to register or update their address ahead of the state's March primary. County officials said during Wednesday's briefing that some voters could have been turned away or forced to cast provisional ballots in March because their registration never showed up.

Collin County Elections Administrator Kaleb Breaux told the Texas Tribune his office has seven full-time voter registration staff and has already brought on 10 temporary workers since Labor Day, with more hires possible depending on the final count.

State officials say the immediate fix is manageable. Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state's office, told NBC News that any voter not appearing on the rolls who believes they registered can cast a provisional ballot, and officials can later verify it against DPS records. Counties have until early voting begins Oct. 19 to finish processing the backlog, and the standard Oct. 5 registration deadline still applies for anyone not yet in the system.

Democrats are demanding answers. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who is running against Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, called the error "unacceptable" and said "the government failed to do its job," according to Democracy Docket. Texas Democrats are asking Gov. Greg Abbott to open an investigation into how the failure went undetected for nearly a year, per the Texas Tribune. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa is also on the ballot in a closely watched race against Abbott.

Democracy Docket noted the error surfaced roughly two months after Texas installed a new top election official, Robert Howden, and reported that his office did not catch the processing failure until county election workers flagged it themselves. That timeline raises questions about oversight at the state level, independent of who caused the original system bug at DPS.

A reasonable concern from the right is that this episode illustrates exactly why some conservatives have been cautious about tying voter registration to automated state IT systems. Online voter registration only exists in Texas at all because of a federal lawsuit under the National Voter Registration Act, as Democracy Docket noted, and this failure shows what happens when a single state portal breaks quietly for months. This represents a legitimate systems-design critique, distinct from any claim of intentional wrongdoing, and no source here alleges DPS or the secretary of state's office acted in bad faith.

Separately, the Daily Signal reported this week that the Justice Department has made 160 election fraud arrests since late 2025, with roughly 1,600 cases in the pipeline nationally, and DOJ officials expect more prosecutions as investigations mature. That reporting is about a distinct, ongoing federal fraud crackdown and no source connects it to the Texas DPS registration failure, which by every account here is a data-transmission error, not a fraud scheme.

DPS has not said what specifically broke in its portal, why it took nearly a year to surface, or how many of the affected records are new registrations versus routine address updates. McGinn told the Texas Tribune the final count keeps climbing daily and won't be settled until later this week, less than two weeks before Texas's Oct. 5 registration deadline.