Weeks before Texas voters head to the polls, an error at the state’s Department of Public Safety has left an unknown number of voter registration applications stuck in limbo.
Now, county election officials are being handed a backlog of applications just as they enter one of the busiest stretches of the election calendar.
DPS failed to send voter registration applications submitted through its online driver’s license portal to county election officials for processing, according to Votebeat. State officials say the affected records were incomplete, which prevented them from being transmitted to the counties.
Exactly how many voters were caught in the problem remains unclear. County election officials are collecting information to determine the scope of the backlog, with one county officials’ association leader saying Wednesday that tens of thousands of applications may be affected. Some applications date back at least a year.
State officials say DPS has identified the affected records and will begin sending them to counties.
But there are still plenty of unanswered questions.
What information was missing from the applications? What caused the records to become incomplete? And how long had the problem been going on?
Officials have not publicly provided those answers.
The Texas secretary of state’s office said it discovered the problem last week after election officials noticed a surge of older voter registration applications coming through the state’s voter registration system.
The timing is particularly awkward.
Texas’ voter registration deadline is October 5, giving counties less than two weeks to process the backlog while also handling new applications arriving ahead of the deadline.
The DPS online portal is not some minor side door into the state’s voter registration system, either.
From 2020 through 2024, roughly 6 million Texans used the DPS website to register to vote, according to testimony DPS officials gave to state lawmakers in 2025. Texas currently has more than 18 million registered voters.
There is, however, an important safeguard for voters caught in the mess.
The secretary of state’s office says voters who submitted their registration through DPS before the October 5 deadline can still have their ballots counted even if their names don’t appear on the voter rolls.
Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, told Votebeat that those voters can cast provisional ballots. Election officials have a process for checking the DPS transaction, and if the records show that the voter registered on time, the provisional ballot will be counted.
But counties now have another problem to deal with: making sure the old DPS applications don’t interfere with newer registration information submitted by the same voters.
For counties working directly in the state’s voter registration system, officials say they can identify voters who submitted more recent information and withhold the older DPS records.
For counties using their own voter registration software, the process is more complicated. Those counties will receive the affected records and have to determine whether voters later submitted updated registration information.
So, with the election approaching, Texas election officials are now dealing with a backlog they didn’t create, an October 5 deadline that isn’t moving, and a basic question that still hasn’t been answered:
How many voter registrations were left sitting in the system because of the DPS error?
For now, Texas officials say they don’t know. And counties are about to find out just how problematic that uncertainty becomes.
