Texas Opens Record Early Voting Clouded by New Registration Backlog

Texas opens early voting on Monday with more registered voters than at any point in its history, state officials announced this week, even as county election offices scrambled for the second time in days to clear a fresh backlog of voter records caused by a state computer error.

The Texas Secretary of State's office said in a news release that 19,041,684 Texans are registered to vote ahead of the Nov. 3 general election, a record for the state and an increase of 2.2 percent over the November 2024 general election. Secretary of State Robert Howden said the figures showed that "Texas continues to see strong voter registration numbers" and that early voting "gives Texans the flexibility to cast their ballots at a time and location that works best for them."

The milestone arrived alongside a less celebratory disclosure. County officials learned Thursday that an error in a Texas.gov tool used to update voter addresses and names had left thousands of records unprocessed, the second such lapse to hit the state's voter rolls in little more than a week, according to reporting by the nonprofit newsroom Votebeat.

The numbers

The Secretary of State's office said roughly 15,000 records statewide were affected by the Texas.gov error, though not every county received them. According to figures compiled by the Texas Association of County Election Officials and reported by Houston Public Media, Bexar County, home to San Antonio, received about 3,000 of the backlogged records on Thursday. Travis County received 1,100, Williamson County 700 and Hays County 400.

That followed a larger problem resolved earlier in the week: a software update to the Texas Department of Public Safety's online driver's license portal had left roughly 500,000 voter registration applications unprocessed for more than a year before counties finished clearing them on Oct. 14.

Registration growth was uneven across the state. Kaufman, Waller, Ellis and Hays counties, all fast-growing suburban areas, posted the largest percentage gains in registered voters since the 2022 midterms, each above 20 percent. Tarrant County, a politically competitive county anchoring Fort Worth, was a rare exception, recording roughly 32,500 fewer registered voters than four years ago even though its overall population has grown.

How the state got here

Both errors trace back to the technology Texas uses to manage its roughly 19 million voter records. The state's TEAM voter registration system draws updates from several outside portals, including the Texas Department of Public Safety's licensing website, where residents can register to vote while renewing a driver's license, and a separate Texas.gov tool for reporting an address or name change.

Texas election officials told Votebeat that the newer problem stemmed from "an extra address validation" step introduced on Texas.gov, in the words of state Elections Director Christina Adkins, who said the system's vendor, Civix, reran every file submitted since Sept. 1 to identify which voters were affected. Texas.gov itself is overseen by the Texas Department of Information Resources and was built by the contractor Deloitte, which also developed the DPS portal where the earlier backlog originated. State officials said the second error, unlike the first, traced back to Civix rather than Deloitte.

Who is affected

The immediate burden has fallen on county voter registrars, who were already absorbing the DPS backlog when the Texas.gov records arrived. Election officials in Bexar, Travis, Williamson and Hays counties must now determine which of the affected address updates were submitted before the Oct. 5 registration deadline, since only those can be processed before early voting opens. Records postmarked or submitted to DPS by the deadline remain valid regardless of when they are entered into the system, and the state says any voter whose name does not yet appear on the rolls because of the delay can cast a provisional ballot.

Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said registrars were already stretched thin preparing voting equipment, training poll workers and processing mail-ballot applications when the new records arrived. He said some of the backlogged files were also missing required address information, forcing additional manual review just as early voting was set to begin.

Reaction

"The current unpredictability of the TEAM system is unsustainable," said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, calling on the Legislature to address the state's voter-registration technology.

McGinn's criticism was aimed squarely at the state system rather than county staff, who he said had little warning before the latest batch of records arrived this week. Adkins, the state elections director, told counties in a Thursday email that "many counties will not see any increase" in their Texas Online registration totals once the review is complete, suggesting the practical effect on individual counties would vary widely. A spokeswoman for the Secretary of State's office, Alicia Pierce, confirmed the roughly 15,000-record figure to reporters, though the office did not respond to further requests for comment on how the error occurred.

The disruption comes against a backdrop of heightened scrutiny of Texas voter rolls. The state turned over its registration list to the U.S. Department of Justice in January at federal officials' request amid a broader push to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote, an effort in which a Department of Homeland Security screening tool was later found to have incorrectly flagged eligible voters in several counties.

What happens next

Early voting runs from Monday, Oct. 19, through Friday, Oct. 30, with Texans able to cast ballots at any polling location in their county of registration. The deadline for county offices to receive an application to vote by mail is Friday, Oct. 23. Voters can confirm their registration status and find polling locations through the state's voter information portal, and Bexar County's elections department was among those posting updated guidance for affected voters this week.

The Secretary of State's office said it was continuing to work through the missing address information in the backlogged files. McGinn said county officials would press lawmakers to overhaul the TEAM system before the next election cycle, arguing that back-to-back technical failures in the same month have left registrars with little margin to prepare for a general election that, by the state's own count, will draw more registered voters than any in Texas history.