Texas voter registration is in chaos days before the October 5 deadline: at least 178,000 registration records submitted through the state's online driver's license portal were never forwarded to county election offices, some dating back to October 2025. Counties across Texas are now racing to process the backlogged applications before the cutoff for the November 3 midterm election.
How 178,000 Registration Records Went Missing
Texans who renew a driver's license or change an address through the Department of Public Safety's online portal can also register to vote or update their registration there. But a software error meant a chunk of those records — flagged as incomplete — were quietly set aside instead of being sent to counties through TEAM, the statewide voter registration system.
The failure dates back at least to October 2025 — nearly a year of applications that voters believed were submitted. Counties first spotted the problem themselves when older DPS applications started surfacing on their dashboards. On September 16, the Secretary of State's elections division told county officials it was "actively investigating" and asked Civix, the vendor that built TEAM, to pull the files. On September 22, the state began pushing the stranded records to counties overnight — and admitted "certain voter registration records from online DPS transactions were incomplete, which resulted in these files not being transmitted to the counties for review."
Officials in seven of Texas's 254 counties have so far confirmed more than 178,000 backlogged records combined, according to a count by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune: more than 68,000 in Dallas County, 40,000 in Collin, 32,000 in Travis, 18,000 in Williamson, 8,200 in Hays, 7,400 in Lubbock and 4,500 in Cameron. Harris County was separately notified of 108,000 records, and is processing about 75,000 of them after removing duplicates. The true statewide total is still unknown.
October 5 Deadline: What Texas Voters Must Do Now
The deadline to register for the November 3 election is Monday, October 5 — Texas law requires registration 30 days before Election Day. Early voting runs October 19–30, and a mail-ballot application must be received by Friday, October 23, per the Secretary of State's office.
Secretary of State spokesperson Alicia Pierce says the backlog should not affect voters' registration status, and the office runs an "Am I Registered?" portal where any voter can check. Anyone who registered through the DPS online portal but doesn't appear on the rolls can still cast a provisional ballot, which counts once the registration is confirmed. Some of the delayed records may belong to people who have since registered another way, or who only submitted address updates.
Deloitte, the Vendor, and the Political Fallout
The error has become a campaign issue. Democratic attorney general candidate Nathan Johnson, a state senator, announced Friday that if elected he would investigate Deloitte and other state vendor contracts. In an interview with CNBC, Johnson said Deloitte allegedly installed a software update on DPS servers in 2025 that triggered the failure, and blamed the outsourcing of core state functions: "I think the voter registration issue is absolutely not the whole story. It's just the leading edge."
Criticism is bipartisan. Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt told Votebeat the Secretary of State's office, which oversees the county-facing system, "should have caught" the missing files: "If the files were received, pulled, or not, that should have been noticeable."
So far, DPS has said only that the error "has been resolved," without explaining the cause or when officials first knew. Governor Greg Abbott's office referred questions to DPS and the Secretary of State. Johnson faces Republican nominee Mayes Middleton in the November 3 race to replace Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The Takeaway
With one day left before the registration deadline, the safest move for Texas voters is to check their status and, if in doubt, submit a fresh application by the October 5 cutoff. The counties are processing, the state's error is fixed — but as Bettencourt and Johnson both argue from opposite sides of the aisle, a system that silently drops registrations for a year without anyone noticing needs more than a patch.
Sources: Votebeat / The Texas Tribune, CNBC via NewsBeep, The Texian Partisan.