Texans who renew a driver's license or change their address on the state's Department of Public Safety website can check a box to register to vote, or update their voter registration, at the same time.

Since October 2025, at least 500,000 registrations and updates submitted that way never reached the county election offices that put voters on the rolls.

On October 14, the Texas Tribune and Votebeat reported that the League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund have sued the state to force it to fix the system before more voters are shut out. Some voters, the lawsuit says, are still running into problems with their registrations ahead of the November 3 election.

The two agencies at fault — DPS and the Texas Secretary of State's office — are state agencies in Greg Abbott's administration. And when reporters asked Abbott about it, he sent them somewhere else.

What went wrong

According to DPS's own explanation to Votebeat, a software update in October 2025 caused three pieces of data to drop out of the daily file DPS sends to the Secretary of State. DPS says it found that problem in late August 2026 and fixed it by September 13.

By then, nearly a year's worth of registrations had piled up. Last month, DPS and the Secretary of State's office dumped the backlog on county election officials — hundreds of thousands of records, at least 500,000 of them, dating back to October 2025. Just days into the dump, the big counties were already swamped: Dallas County alone had more than 68,000, Collin 40,000, Travis 32,000.

County officials say the state's own voter registration system has made it even harder to clear the backlog in the weeks before an election.

They were warned in March

This wasn't a surprise nobody could have seen coming.

Records obtained by Votebeat show that in March 2026, state Sen. Donna Campbell's office — a Republican's office — flagged a problem with voter registrations through the DPS website. DPS told her office on March 10 that it had "recently became aware of an issue affecting voter registration information." DPS said that problem was a different programming change, was resolved, and affected nearly 1,000 transactions.

But complaints kept coming. And the far bigger failure, running since October 2025, went unnoticed for five more months.

The Secretary of State's elections director, Christina Adkins, told county officials on a September call that her office "had been assured that there were no problems." When DPS finally came forward, she said, "it was quite the surprise."

Republicans in Abbott's own party have said it should have been caught. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican, told Votebeat: "They should have caught it."

Abbott's answer: ask somebody else

In July, Abbott appointed his own legislative director, Robert Howden, as Secretary of State — the official in charge of Texas elections — less than four months before the midterms.

When Votebeat asked Abbott whether he was concerned about the error or had given DPS any direction, he referred the questions to DPS and the Secretary of State's office.

DPS says the error has been resolved, but it has not answered questions about the specific steps it took to keep it from happening again. And when voting rights groups first raised the problem, the Secretary of State's general counsel brushed them off over their "reliance on three purported instances across the State."

The voter-roll governor, when it's his mistake

Greg Abbott has made a career out of the voter rolls — when the story is about kicking people off them.

In 2024, he put out a press release bragging that Texas had removed more than a million people from its rolls, led by 6,500 noncitizens. As we reported, his own office's report had confirmed 581. The rest were mostly people who hadn't answered a letter — and Abbott's office later quietly added the word "potential."

So when the governor thinks the rolls have too many names, he holds a press conference. When his own agencies lose half a million Texans' registrations and updates for a year, he refers questions elsewhere.

Why the lawsuit

This isn't the first fight over this system. Texas was sued over it in 2016 and again in 2020. In 2021, the state settled, promising to permanently keep a working way to register to vote through the DPS website.

The new lawsuit, filed last week in Bexar County, says the state has broken that promise "since at least October 2025." It asks a judge to order DPS and the Secretary of State to keep the system working, hand over records of the failures, and prove to the court within a month that they've complied.

"Before a critical midterm election, the state is in denial about issues with the DPS system despite knowing voters have already been impacted," said Karla Maradiaga of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which represents the groups.

What you can do

If you registered or updated your address through DPS in the past year, don't assume you're registered. Check your registration through the state's VoteTexas registration page, and contact your county elections office if something looks wrong.

The bottom line

A software error inside Greg Abbott's administration kept at least 500,000 Texans' voter registrations and updates made through the DPS website from reaching county election offices from October 2025 until September 2026. DPS was told of registration problems in March. Abbott, whose own appointee runs Texas elections, referred questions about it to them, and voting rights groups have now sued the state for breaking a 2021 promise to keep the system working.

Source

Texas sued for failing to process 500,000+ voter registrations — The Texas Tribune / Votebeat