Computer Glitch Leaves Nearly 600,000 Texas Voter Registrations in Limbo Days Before Early Voting, per The Guardian
Receipts said registered. The rolls said otherwise.
A computer glitch has left nearly 600,000 Texans' voter registrations in limbo days before early voting starts, per The Guardian.
Texas is scrambling to process a backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registrations after a state computer failure, with early voting opening Monday, October 19, per The Guardian. From October 2025 to February 2026, Texans who chose to register to vote on the Department of Public Safety's driver's license website got receipts confirming it. But their registrations were never actually recorded.
The failure sat in the DPS web portal, where Texans renew a license or update an address and register to vote in the same transaction. According to a lawsuit filed by voting groups, DPS failed to send almost 600,000 registrations on to the secretary of state's office as of September 22, some of them dating back to October 2025.
An upgrade, a vendor, and months of silence
The backlog traces to a programming error in the portal, introduced during a system upgrade. State Senator Paul Bettencourt told The New York Times the upgrade work was done by Deloitte, the consulting and government IT contractor. The problem then went unnoticed for months while applicants kept receiving confirmations.
Counties discovered the gap in mid-September, and the state sent election officials a backlog of at least 500,000 records at once, per the Texas Tribune. Problems with the state's voter registration system, known as TEAM, made the pile harder to work through, election officials told the Tribune, and news coverage prompted some voters to register a second time, adding duplicates to the stack.
The failure also put the state in breach of its own legal commitments, according to the suit. Under a 2021 settlement, Texas agreed to let residents register or update their registration whenever they renew a license or change their address online, a system about six million Texans have used since 2020.
A lawsuit, and a scramble to clear the pile
The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund sued the secretary of state and DPS on October 9 in Bexar County, naming Secretary of State Robert Howden and DPS Director Freeman F. Martin. The suit seeks a permanent injunction requiring the state to process registrations correctly, not damages.
By Wednesday, county election officials said the backlog had been mostly cleared, and several said there was little risk that Texans who tried to register would be unable to vote. Voters who show up and find they are not on the rolls can still cast a provisional ballot. Voting advocates counter that the episode itself may discourage turnout, and Senator Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Rules Committee, has written to Governor Greg Abbott and Howden demanding an explanation.
Early voting for the November 3 election runs Monday, October 19 through October 30. Texas is home to one of the year's most competitive US Senate races, which is why a paperwork failure in the state's second most populous election system is drawing national attention.
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Election administration failures do not have a direct ticker. DPS is a state agency and Deloitte, the contractor named in connection with the upgrade, is privately held, so there is no listed name carrying this headline as revenue risk.
What it feeds is midterm headline risk. A registration fight in a state with a marquee Senate race, four days before early voting, is the kind of story that keeps election week volatility bid in SPY and keeps traders watching court filings alongside economic data.
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