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Six months before the Texas Department of Public Safety and Secretary of State’s Office were forced to send hundreds of thousands of backlogged voter registration records to local county officials, both agencies were warned that records were getting lost in DPS’s web portal.
A state lawmaker flagged an issue with voter registration records in March, public records show. The agencies said that problem was resolved. But complaints about the portal continued. And in August the agencies realized they had a big issue — at least 500,000 backlogged voter registration records sent to county election officials last week.
Now, county election administrators are scrambling with little time to sort through those records before the critical Nov. 3 midterm election.
State officials said the most recent backlog of records was due to an October 2025 software update by a DPS vendor. Software engineering and election administration experts say the state agencies should have tested updates to their respective systems, including how they worked together, and developed ways to immediately alert state officials of errors.
“To me, it just looks like they did not have the people with the depth of knowledge and maybe experience to make sure that they were testing everything that they needed to test,” said Trevor Timmons, the former chief information technology officer for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office confirmed it had tested how a new version of its voter registration management system, known as TEAM, worked with DPS’s portal before launching its system overhaul in July 2025. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and DPS did not respond to questions about whether they had again tested the systems before the October 2025 DPS update.
DPS acknowledged in March that a “programming change” had prevented the processing of nearly 1,000 voter registration applications and updates Texans submitted through its web portal between December and February, public records show.
The agency assured state Sen. Donna Campbell’s office, which was seeking information on behalf of a constituent, that the error had been resolved, according to a March email. State information technology officials “are monitoring online activity for any unforeseen anomalies. Should they encounter irregularities, they will be notifying the Department immediately,” a DPS official wrote in the email obtained by the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit that advocates for voting rights, and shared with Votebeat.
DPS officials told Campbell’s office that a programming change made by the Department of Information Resources (DIR), which administers the web portal, and its vendor, Deloitte, caused the issue. The voter registration selections made during online driver’s license and state ID transactions could “not be saved or transmitted to the Department,” DPS said.
Voters who checked the option “yes” to register to vote received a receipt reflecting their selection. But the transaction didn’t go through due to the programming error, DPS said. As a result, voters’ applications and address updates weren’t actually submitted and their records were never sent to the secretary of state. DPS officials said DIR and its vendor were not able to identify the impacted records, so voter registration records were corrected “only when a customer provides a copy of their transaction receipt,” the emails say.
Warnings about the system’s flaws continued. In July, voting rights advocates wrote to both DPS and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office citing similar problems with the web portal.
“As a result, Texas voters showed up to the polls during recent elections believing they had successfully updated their voter registration on DPS’s website, only to discover their registration was not updated,” the Texas Civil Rights Project wrote in the letter shared with Votebeat.
Both agencies responded. DPS told the group that technical issues are promptly resolved. The secretary of state’s office said it receives files of voter registration records daily from DPS and sends them to local election officials, and that it was following state and federal laws.
Despite the assurances, problems with voter registration applications submitted through the portal have continued to surface.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to specific questions for this story. In an emailed statement Thursday, spokesperson Alicia Pierce said the office is “laser-focused on helping counties process these registrations and ensuring all eligible Texans can exercise their right to vote. We will continue to review our processes and procedures to identify areas of improvement and ways to prevent similar issues in the future.”
In a September call with county election officials, Christina Adkins, the secretary of state’s elections division director, described “a little frustration” because, she said, her office had “made inquiries, expressed concerns” to DPS related to complaints about the portal and “had been assured that there were no problems.”
“So when DPS presented this information to us, it was quite the surprise,” she said, according to a recording of the call obtained by Votebeat.
In an emailed statement Wednesday, DPS said the error that led to the backlog announced last week had been resolved and the agency “has not identified any further issues with the transfer of its daily batch reports of voter information.”
“Additional controls are now in place between DPS and the SOS to confirm that complete information has been sent and received, so this cannot be replicated in the future,” the DPS statement said.
The agency did not respond to questions about specific steps taken after the incidents to prevent them from continuing.
Election officials must now process the delayed records and add voters to the rolls just weeks before the midterm election, in a year when some high-profile statewide races could be close. If voters show up at the polls and aren’t listed as registered, they’ll be asked to vote using provisional ballots, which will require extra steps to confirm their eligibility before those ballots can be counted.
Some better-resourced counties, including Dallas, have already been able to get through their backlogs; Dallas had nearly 70,000 records. Others are working long hours to do so.
The news of the backlog sparked bipartisan calls from state lawmakers for an investigation into what went wrong. At least one key GOP legislator said the secretary of state’s office should have caught the problem sooner. Timmons, the former Colorado official who is now vice president of Ready for Tuesday, an organization that provides operational support for election officials, agrees.
“They both should have been staying in touch about system upgrades to make sure everything is still flowing along normally, and just making sure that you had the right people talking to each other,” he said.
‘Technical incompetence’
Voting rights advocates with the Texas Civil Rights Project, the nonprofit group that wrote to DPS and the secretary of state in July, are skeptical the problems are fixed.
Although the magnitude of the most recent problem is unlike what officials and advocates have seen before, election officials, voters, and the Texas Secretary of State’s Office have long said that voters’ attempts to register via DPS — in person and through its web portal — don’t always work. That has led to some voters having to cast provisional ballots in past elections, as Votebeat previously reported.
Karla Maradiaga, a voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the years-long problems signal a lack of oversight.
“They say they have checks in place,” Maradiaga said. “Either that’s not true or whatever checks they have in place are not working.”
William Furney, 29, a voter from North Texas, believes he may have been one of the voters whose registration was never sent to county officials.
In October 2025, after he moved from Collin to Dallas County, he used DPS’s web portal.
“I checked the option to register to vote. I thought everything was good, I got the receipt, I got the driver’s license in the mail, I thought everything had transferred over fine,” Furney said.
But on Election Day for the March primary he found out it hadn’t worked. He was told he wasn’t on the list of registered voters and offered a provisional ballot.
Furney told the poll worker he’d updated his address and had registered through the DPS web portal, “and the immediate response I got from him was something like, ‘oh I can’t believe this is happening again,’ like he had seen this happening before,” Furney said.
Furney said he spent about an hour at the polling site to cast his provisional ballot. Weeks later, he got a notice from the county saying his ballot was not accepted, he said.
“It was so frustrating to have to go through all that process just to be told my vote wouldn’t count because I wasn’t registered,” Furney said. “It just kind of illustrates the technical incompetence of Texas state government. If DPS isn’t capable of delivering these registration changes in time, like, why even offer the service?”
Lawmakers promise investigations into the problem
Two key GOP lawmakers have promised investigations into what went wrong. State Rep. Matt Shaheen, the chair of the Texas House Elections Committee, previously told Votebeat he has spoken directly with DPS officials and is “going to personally make sure whoever is responsible for the mistake is held accountable.”
Still, Shaheen, a Republican from North Texas who has a background in technology and software management, said questions about whether the agencies adequately tested how the systems work together are “speculation.”
“A lot of different things can happen when you’re working with these systems,” he said.
But state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, said this is a “two-agency snafu that could have easily been resolved with some better programming.” He previously said the Texas Secretary of State’s Office should have flagged the problem sooner. “If something stops happening, you either have to ring the alarm bell, or you have to have somebody looking at the data that realizes that something’s wrong,” he said.
The public records show there were multiple complaints about the DPS portal.
A staff member for Campbell’s office first reached out to DPS officials on March 9 about a constituent who had tried to update her address via the state agency’s web portal. The change had not been made. “Please advise if anyone can figure out what happened,” Campbell’s office wrote.
DPS officials responded the next day.
“The Department recently became aware of an issue affecting voter registration information collected through the online driver’s license feature,” the email response says. “The issue impacted transactions completed between December 6, 2025 and February 26, 2026.”
The agency said it immediately alerted the secretary of state’s office to the problem and the programming error was resolved.
In an email on March 12, in summarizing transactions made using the web portal during the March Primary election, DPS officials said 992 transactions were conducted during the period affected by the programming issue.
“We also responded to 53 election officials to provide an online receipt because the voter claimed they had selected “yes” during the DIR programming issue,” a DPS official wrote. “And four records were changed to “yes” because we received their online receipt.”
Then, in July, the Texas Civil Rights Project and the League of Women Voters wrote to DPS and the secretary of state’s office to say that the portal appeared to be failing. The organizations said they received complaints from at least three voters who selected the voter registration option on DPS’s web portal but later found that their registration had never been updated.
The groups argued that the problems could violate a 2021 legal settlement that directed the state agencies to maintain a system that allows voters to register online while updating their driver’s license or state ID, and could be in violation of federal law.
“As with any complex data-transfer system, occasional technical issues may arise,” D. Phillip Adkins, DPS’s general counsel, responded on Aug. 6, according to the records. “When they do, the Department works promptly to identify and resolve them in close coordination with the secretary of state.”
The secretary of state’s general counsel, Adam Bitter, responded too.
“Your reliance on three purported instances across the State — out of more than 18 million registrants — is sorely misguided,” he wrote. “Indeed, nothing in your letter establishes—or even suggests — that the Secretary of State or DPS has failed to comply” with the settlement or federal or state law, he wrote, adding, “should you choose to proceed with litigation on this matter, we stand ready to vigorously contest your allegations.”
State officials say they worked quickly to resolve the problem
Both agencies have said that an October 2025 software update to the DPS portal by vendor Deloitte, caused the current massive backlog.
DPS in its statement Wednesday said the update “caused three pieces of data to be omitted from the daily file” sent to the secretary of state that has information from online driver’s license and state ID transactions.
DPS said that in late August, “the department identified the missing data fields issue” and immediately worked with the secretary of state’s office and their third-party vendor, Civix, to resolve it.
The issue was resolved as of Sept. 13, DPS said.
On Sept. 23, Adkins, the secretary of state’s elections division director, acknowledged in the call with county officials that voters and county officials had reported problems with DPS voter registration applications to her agency. She said her office had asked DPS about them.
“We noticed that we were missing some daily files from DPS,” Adkins said. “This is something that happens and has happened from time to time over the years, where we don’t get a file posted for our system to pull down and automatically process.”
She said the office reached out to DPS to investigate. About a week later, DPS said that “there were some bigger issues that were going on that they needed to alert us to,” Adkins said.
Adkins said that because the records were missing key data points, the automated process didn’t match records and push the data to counties as it typically did. Adkins told county officials she and her staff did not know at first exactly how many records they’d be receiving.
“We had some kind of broad ideas from what they were telling us, but we’re not given any kind of specific numbers,” Adkins said. “So when we got the records on the 14th, they were pretty large files, pretty substantial records, and we knew there was going to be quite a bit of data there.”
Adkins added that DPS requested that both agencies work together “over the next couple of weeks to do some manual verifications on a daily basis. They want to ensure that the modifications that they have made to their system to address this issue are in place and working as they should be, and not impacting files going forward,” she said.
Adkins told county officials that her office would be conducting “additional manual verifications going forward, especially through this very critical early voter registration timeframe leading up to the November election.”
She Adkins said her staff is now having “some bigger discussions about other safeguards” to prevent such problems.
“I think our obligation right now is really to our voters, to make sure that these voters are not impacted and that they can vote a regular ballot in November, as they should be able to,” Adkins told county election officials.
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.
