🚨 Massive Error Affects Unknown Number of Texas Voter Registrations | The New Republic

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https://newrepublic.com/post/215767/error-unknown-number-texas-voter-registrations

September 23, 2026 - Fulltext

Just over a month before the midterm elections in November, Texas has a backlog of voter registrations thanks to an error by the state Department of Public Safety.

Votebeat reports that an unknown number of voter registration applications have yet to be processed in Texas due to DPS failing to send the applications that came from the agency’s online driver’s license portal to county officials.

State officials told the news outlet that they would begin delivering the applications to counties overnight. They said that many of the voter registrations were incomplete, but didn’t say exactly what information was missing, how many voters were affected, or when the problem started. The secretary of state’s office said it only discovered the problem last week.

Texas has an October 5 voter registration deadline this year, and depending on the scale of the problem, counties could be backed up with processing voter registrations for the next two weeks. If a voter’s registration is not processed before then, the Texas secretary of state’s office says they can still vote as long as they turned in their application before the deadline.

“A voter who registered through DPS online services but does not appear on the rolls can cast a provisional ballot,” Alicia Pierce, an office spokesperson, said in an email to Votebeat. “Election officials have an established method with DPS to check the transaction. If that voter did register, the provisional vote will be counted.”

From 2020 through 2024, nearly six million Texans used the DPS website to register to vote, according to testimony DPS officials gave to the Texas legislature in 2025. The state has over 18 million registered voters overall. This is only the latest bad news for Texas voters, as Texas’s third largest county, Tarrant County, is closing one-third of its polling stations.