Texas counties appear to be done working through more than half a million stuck voter registration records that went unprocessed for over a year because of a state software error, according to state and county election officials quoted by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune.
The Texas Secretary of State's Office and the Texas Association of County Election Officials both said Wednesday they knew of no county that still had records left to process. "Texas counties have worked diligently and have cleared the backlog," said Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, in an email.
What went wrong
DPS said in September that the problem came from a software update to its online driver's license portal, which Texans can use to register or update their voter information. The stuck records went back to October 2025.
The backlog came to light shortly before the Oct. 5 registration deadline for the Nov. 3 election, leaving election offices to work through it while new applications kept arriving every day.
Collin County, along with Dallas and Harris counties, was one of the counties with more resources, including outside vendors and added technology, that finished their share in about a week, the report says. Other election officials said problems with the state's own registration system, called TEAM, made the work harder.
Voting rights organizations have filed suit, arguing the backlog violated a 2021 settlement that required Texas to offer a dependable way to register through the DPS portal. The state says it will still pay counties' overtime and temporary staffing costs tied to the backlog.
Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator who leads the county officials' association, credited county workers and said the state should look for ways to keep it from happening again.
