As early voting begins, lawsuit, complaints filed over registration issues

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(The Center Square) – As early voting is underway in Texas, a lawsuit has been filed against state agencies over problems creating a backlog of more than 500,000 registration applications and concerns continued to be raised just days before early voting began Monday morning. 

The issue stems from a problem with the Secretary of State and Texas Department of Public Safety voter registration management system (Texas Election Administration Management system (TEAM)), which launched last July and caused voter registration information not to be sent to counties. In response, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, said he began working with state and county officials to ensure the backlog and underlying issue was corrected prior to early voting, The Center Square reported. 

As of Oct. 15, the voter registration backlog had been cleared, Bettencourt said. “Texas counties have cleared a several hundred thousand voter registration backlog from a DPS software update error late last year through lots of catch-up work across the state,” he said. In Texas’ largest county, Harris County, which Bettencourt represents, the county registrar said it alone cleared an additional 108,000 voter registration backlog sent from the SOS, The Center Square reported.

Nevertheless, groups sued and voter registration technical difficulties have persisted.

The League of Women Voters Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund sued the SOS and Texas DPS arguing the agencies breached a 2020 election lawsuit settlement agreement. The lawsuit alleges that DPS failed to send nearly 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. 

The lawsuit alleges the problem will injure “each and every voter who must use a non-compliant and unreliable voter registration system for online DPS applications. It also injures currently affected voters because they will need to take extra steps to vote – either casting a provisional or potentially limited ballot – when early voting begins on October 19, 2026, as well as future voters in similar circumstances.”

The lawsuit points to a Texas Association of County Election Officials (TACEO) survey of problems counties had with the TEAM system statewide. It also points to DPS officials acknowledging technical difficulties with Texas.gov when people processed their driver’s license online and registered to vote. A technical glitch impacted nearly 1,000 people who reported issues when they attempted to vote in the March primaries, according to an official email cited in the lawsuit. \

“Because not every voter reports issues, the true number of impacted voters is unknown,” the lawsuit says. 

It also points to problems with the DPS website not properly recording voter registration requests, a problem pointed out in a state Senate State Affairs committee hearing in June. At the time, the SOS said it was still working through a TEAM system update – four months before early voting. 

The lawsuit requests the court, among other things, require the agencies to comply with the settlement agreement.

The state agencies did not respond to requests for comment about the lawsuit or TEAM errors but last week the SOS sent an email to the counties about ongoing issues. TACEO forwarded the email to The Center Square, which states that as of Friday morning, many counties were reporting that the address field for new imported voter registration records from Texas online transactions were blank.  

Bexar County had received about 3,000 online voter registration application updates with this problem. Harris County received the most of roughly 2,400; Travis County roughly 1,100; Williamson County roughly 700; Hays County, roughly 400; Bastrop County roughly 100, according to the SOS email.

Statewide, the SOS confirmed to Votebeat the total was roughly 15,000. 

The SOS email states that an issue related to Texas.gov transactions “while not as voluminous as the DPS backlog (which spanned 11 months), it was not an insignificant number, all between September 1 — the week of October 5th (the voter registration deadline).” 

As a result, county administrators “had to sift through and determine which ones were timely submitted by the Oct. 5 deadline” and needed to be on the official list of registered voters by the beginning of early voting on Monday morning.

The SOS escalated the issue to its vendor, Civix, which fixed the problem, it said.

In response, TACEO Executive Director Chris McGinn told The Center Square, "Just when most counties were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, another unexpected backlog is being dropped on county voter registrars. This continued mismanagement at the state level requires action and accountability from the Texas Legislature, because the current unpredictability of the TEAM system is unsustainable for our state’s election system. As always, Texas county election officials will be working around the clock to make sure the election is conducted with integrity and professionalism, and that voters can trust the accuracy of the outcome.” 

TACEO also told The Center Square that county administrators worked through the weekend statewide to ensure all registration information was accurate and updated. They are also working to ensure the election runs as smoothly as possible, TACEO said.