Backlog spans October 2025 to February 2026; early voting opens Monday

A lawsuit filed last week accuses Texas election and public safety officials of allowing a software error to delay the processing of almost 600,000 voter registration applications, leaving counties to manage the backlog days before early voting begins in the state.

The League of Women Voters of Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing civic participation among young Texans, brought the legal challenge against the Texas Secretary of State’s office and the Department of Public Safety (DPS), according to the complaint.

The lawsuit traces the failure to the DPS website used for driver’s license applications, which is also designed to register Texans to vote or change their existing registration during the same transaction. Between October 2025 and February 2026, residents who selected “yes” when prompted about voter registration received confirmation receipts, even though the system never recorded their information, according to the complaint.

“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,” the lawsuit alleges. “Unexpecting counties must now scramble to process this deluge of last-minute voter registrations ahead of the November 2026 election.”

The complaint also alleges that state officials 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.”

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit are Texas Secretary of State Robert Howden, the state’s top election official, and DPS Director Freeman F Martin. The plaintiffs are asking a court to order the agencies to establish and maintain a working voter registration process, produce records detailing the registration failures, and submit evidence of compliance to the court within one month.

The registration breakdown comes as Texas prepares for one of the country’s most closely contested U.S. Senate elections. President Donald Trump chose Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to run against James Talarico, a political newcomer who Democrats hope will be able to flip a longtime Republican-held seat.

Last month, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla of California, a Democrat and the ranking member of the Senate rules committee, which has oversight of federal elections, demanded answers about the voting registration system from Texas leaders. In a letter addressed to Gov. Greg Abbott and Howden, Padilla pressed for an explanation of how the failure occurred and how many registrations were affected.

The lawsuit arrives amid broader concerns from voting rights advocates about what they describe as 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.

Early voting in Texas is scheduled to begin Monday.