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Just weeks before the pivotal midterm elections, Texas election officials have discovered that an unknown number of voter registration applications have not been processed due to an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
DPS failed to send the applications, which were submitted by voters through its online driver's license portal, to county voter registrars for processing, according to an email sent to county officials and provided to Votebeat. The state confirmed to Votebeat that it would begin delivering the unsent registrations to county officials overnight.
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.
The DPS portal is a major voter registration channel in Texas. From 2020 through 2024, about 6 million Texans used it to register to vote, according to testimony DPS officials provided to state lawmakers in 2025. Texas has more than 18 million registered voters.
The Texas Association of County Election Officials is collecting information from its members to determine the scale of the issue. DPS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The problem comes less than two weeks before the Oct. 5 voter registration deadline, and the sudden arrival of older applications from DPS is likely to add to counties' voter registration processing backlogs at one of the busiest points in the election calendar.
Voters whose registrations were affected by this issue can still have their ballots counted as long as they submitted their registration before the Oct. 5 deadline, said Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state's office.
"A voter who registered through DPS online services but does not appear on the rolls can cast a provisional ballot," Pierce said in an email to Votebeat. "Election officials have an established method with DPS to check the transaction. If that voter did register, the provisional vote will be counted."
Texas does not have online voter registration, but since September 2020, after voting rights groups sued the state and DPS, eligible Texans who renew their driver's license and state ID or update their address online can also choose to register to vote through that same online portal.
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.
In an email to county election officials sent after the discovery and obtained by Votebeat, state elections director Christina Adkins said the agency was "actively investigating this issue to determine the source of these historical records." She said the agency asked Civix, the voter registration vendor that developed the latest version of TEAM, to "temporarily remove the files from county dashboards while we work to address this issue."
In a second email sent Tuesday, Adkins said DPS had determined that some voter registration records from its online transactions were incomplete, which prevented them from being sent to counties. She said the state and DPS had identified the affected records and that the state was "working with DPS to ensure that the modifications they made to their system to address this issue are not impacting daily files going forward," Adkins said.
Counties will now have to process the older registrations while making sure they do not overwrite more recent updates submitted by the same voters. For counties that work directly in TEAM, the state said it was able to identify voters with newer registration information and would withhold the older DPS record, Adkins wrote.
The task will be more complicated for counties that use their own voter registration software rather than working directly in TEAM. The state cannot perform the same check for those counties, so they will receive all of the affected DPS records and will have to determine whether individual voters subsequently submitted newer registration information. Adkins said the state said it would send those records in batches and work with the counties' voter registration vendors to process them.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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