Still a big mess, and like most big messes in the state of Texas, it’s the locals who are left to clean up after the state people.
Still the only voter ID anyone should need
Texas’ backlog of at least 200,000 voter registration applications and updates, which election officials must now process in the weeks before the critical midterm elections due to state error, is highlighting just how difficult it can be to register to vote in Texas, voting rights experts said.
Texas is one of just eight states that doesn’t have universal online voter registration and it severely restricts voter registration efforts. Texans with driver’s licenses can use the state Department of Public Safety’s web portal to register to vote or update their voter registration. But that’s the only online option for registration — and it was ordered by a judge after a six-year long legal battle. More than 6 million voters have used the portal since it launched in 2020.
But Votebeat and the Texas Tribune reported an untimely flaw in that system earlier this week: DPS failed to send counties thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through that web portal, dating back to October 2025. The agency blamed the error on a software update. The problem has sparked bipartisan calls for an investigation into what went wrong, and state officials so far have provided few details.
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Emily French, Texas Policy Director at Common Cause, said the state should find a way to reach out to all impacted voters, especially since several statewide races on the Nov. 3 ballot are expected to be close.
“That should be step one,” French said. “Tell every affected voter you’re eligible, you did everything right. You will be registered to vote — tell every affected voter they can vote a provisional ballot.”
State officials said voters who don’t appear on the rolls because of this error can still ask to cast a provisional ballot, and election officials will count it once they confirm the voter had registered via DPS by the appropriate deadline.
But there are concerns that having to fill out a provisional ballot unexpectedly will cause confusion at polls, which members of the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus highlighted in a Friday letter to Abbott.
State senators sent the governor a list of questions, including “What safeguards failed?” and “What support will the state provide to counties?” They also want to know how many of the applications and updates that languished were submitted before the March primary.
State Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Democrat who sits on the House Elections Committee, said she’s going to push for tighter protocols in the upcoming legislative session to ensure that future errors are caught earlier.
“I’m going to be looking at ways to require fast alerts and repairs,” Plesa said. “Notify the secretary of state of any affected county, notify applicants about what’s going on, and definitely protect the voters’ original submission.”
See here for the background. I think in the end most of this will get straightened out, and it will be because the staffers and temp workers hired at the various county elections offices worked their collective asses off to fix it. The story mentions that the SOS’s office has offered grants to the counties to cover costs for their fixing this, but of course there are no details, so who the hell knows what that even means. The one minor positive out of all this is that there ought to be a clear path for making improvements to the overall voter registration system in the next legislative session – the problems go deeper than this snafu, read the story for more – but I doubt that will mean better prospects for online voter registration. That’s going to take a wholesale overhaul of state government first.
In case you were wondering, Harris County has 75K updates to process. Tarrant County has 74K, while Dallas and Collin counties combine for 100K. I didn’t google beyond that, but you get the point. There’s a lot of them. Many people are working on it. Greg Abbott hasn’t said a thing. And so it goes.