Texas sued after glitch delays almost 600,000 voter registrations

Texas election officials are struggling to process a massive backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications after a major state computer system failure, just days before early voting is set to open on Monday and amid concerns about widespread voter suppression.The disruption has raised serious concerns about the state’s voter registration system, with voting rights organizations accusing Texas officials of failing to ensure that eligible voters could properly register.The problem originated from a software error involving the Texas-department-of-public-safety" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="145419" data-entity-type="organization">Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), according to a lawsuit filed last week. The glitch affected a website used for driver’s license applications that was also designed to allow Texans to register to vote.The lawsuit alleges that between October 2025 and February 2026, residents who selected “yes” when asked whether they wanted to register to vote were given receipts confirming their selections. However, their registration information was never actually recorded.The Texas" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="218217" data-entity-type="organization">League of Women Voters of Texas and Texas-civic-fund" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="218218" data-entity-type="organization">Move Texas Civic Fund, a non-profit dedicated to increasing civic participation among young Texans, brought the legal challenge against state officials.“Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit said.“DPS had failed to send almost 600,000 voter registrations to the SOS to distribute to local county registrars, with some delayed voter registrations stretching back as far as October 2025,” it added. “Unexpecting counties must now scramble to process this deluge of last-minute voter registrations ahead of the November 2026 election.”Among those named in the complaint are the Texas-secretary-of-state" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="166464" data-entity-type="organization">Texas Secretary of State, Robert Howden, the state’s top election official, and the DPS director, Freeman F Martin.The lawsuit demands that both agencies establish and maintain a working voter registration process. It also seeks records detailing registration failures and an order requiring officials to provide the court with evidence of compliance within one month.The registration breakdown is drawing national attention as Texas prepares for one of the country’s most closely contested US Senate elections this year. Donald Trump chose Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, to run against James Talarico, a political newcomer who Democrats hope will be able to flip Texas’s longtime red Senate seat to blue.The California Democratic senator Alex Padilla, ranking member of the Senate rules committee, which has oversight of federal elections, demanded answers about the voting registration system from Texas leaders last month.In a letter addressed to the state governor, Greg Abbott, and Howden, Padilla pressed for an explanation of how the failure occurred and how many registrations were affected.The controversy comes as voting rights advocates continue to warn about what they describe as broader efforts by the Trump administration to suppress voter participation. Those concerns include bids to rig electoral maps and threats to deploy federal law enforcement at polling sites, among other actions.