Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.
A key Texas Republican lawmaker says state officials must be held accountable for an error that led to a backlog of at least 178,000 voter registration applications from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Votebeat reported earlier this week that DPS failed to send counties thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through its online driver’s license portal. Some of those date back at least a year, and counties are now being hit with a deluge of applications to process in the weeks leading up to November’s midterm election.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston who has championed election administration legislation for years, told Votebeat on Thursday that although a DPS failure is at the heart of the problem, the Texas Secretary of State’s office should have caught the issue because it oversees the system the counties use to receive the files from DPS.
“If the files were received, pulled, or not, that should have been noticeable,” Bettencourt said. “They should have caught it.”
When asked whether he was concerned about the error or whether he had offered DPS specific direction on how to handle it, Gov. Greg Abbott referred questions to the agency and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
DPS has said only that the error has been resolved, but has not offered details on how it was fixed or responded to further questions about the cause.
The backlogged voter registration records go back at least as far as October 2025. They could include new registrations or simply updates to voters’ existing records, like a change in address.
The exact number of outstanding applications statewide is still unknown, but officials in seven of Texas’ 254 counties have confirmed receiving more than a combined 178,000 records. Some of the people whose applications were delayed may have since registered another way.
Bettencourt said he spoke directly with Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden about the error after Votebeat first reported it earlier this week. Howden, who took office in July, recognized the DPS error has to be fixed and the backlog addressed as soon as possible, Bettencourt said. A spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Texas Democrats have called for investigations, as well. The error surfaced just weeks before a hotly contested midterm election in which Democrats are hoping to be competitive for statewide offices, including a closely watched U.S. Senate contest.
Bettencourt also brought up ongoing issues with TEAM, the state’s voter registration system, which was overhauled last summer by the secretary of state’s office. The majority of counties in the state rely on the system to manage elections and to maintain voter registration lists, and election officials quickly began highlighting problems both before and after the July 2025 launch.
For more than a year, county election officials have been asking for fixes to functionality issues with TEAM that prevent them from completing essential tasks, such as easily sorting through voter registration applications by date. Some of the problems have been resolved, but others — such as the system operating very slowly — are ongoing, election officials say.
In June, Bettencourt publicly asked the secretary of state’s office for assurances that TEAM would be fixed before November’s election and questioned whether the Louisiana-based vendor that developed the system, Civix, was the correct choice.
On Thursday, Bettencourt said he still has concerns. TEAM’s functionality is “basic to rudimentary from what they need in voter registration in a modern sense,” he said.
The secretary of state’s office is well-regarded for its expertise in election law, he said, but he criticized their operational efficiency.
“They’re gonna have to shift from being a legal-driven response organization to an operationally excellent organization,” he said. “They’re going to have to do both.”
DPS error leaves officials scrambling
Texas’ largest counties have received tens of thousands of backlogged voter registration applications and updates after the DPS debacle.
Dallas County on Thursday confirmed receiving more than 68,000, and Williamson County has received 18,000. Lubbock County confirmed receiving 7,400, Hays County received 8,200, and Cameron County confirmed 4,500. Votebeat reported Wednesday that Collin County confirmed receiving 40,000, and Travis County 32,000.
The secretary of state’s office has said it learned of the backlogged voter registration applications last week, after county election officials flagged that they’d noticed a surge in “older” voter registration applications and updates coming from DPS. Those applications and updates are sent from DPS to counties via TEAM.
State officials said the affected transactions involved incomplete voter registration records, which were withheld instead of being transmitted to county registrars.
Officials have not said what information was missing, what caused the records to be incomplete, how many voters were affected, why incomplete information would have prevented the transmission, or exactly when the problem began.
It’s not clear how many registrations were new versus address updates for already-registered voters, or whether the error prevented any voter from casting a ballot in the March primary election.
Bettencourt said election officials across the state have been working nonstop to get through the thousands of applications that have dropped in their laps. He described the task as monumental, but said county officials would get it done.
“What I am impressed with is how much the counties are working to fix all of this in bipartisan unanimity,” Bettencourt said.
Texas Tribune reporter Colleen DeGuzman contributed reporting.
Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
