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The Bexar County Elections Department said it was sent tens of thousands of voter registrations by the Texas Department of Safety overnight. This backlog was due to an error in processing Texas driver’s license registrations.
As was first reported by the Texas Tribune, Texas DPS failed to send voter registration to Texas county election officials due to an unspecified error in processing online driver’s license applications. It’s not clear how many registrations are affected statewide.
A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety in an email to Texas Public Radio said the issue had been resolved but did not provide further details.
"DPS transmits voter registration information to the Secretary of State (SOS). Certain online records were incomplete and not fully transmitted. The system issue has been resolved, and DPS worked with SOS to identify incomplete records to backfill incomplete information," the statement said.
Bexar County Elections Administrator Michele Carew said her office is prepared to handle the sudden influx.
“The Bexar County Elections Department has received a little over 45,000 online Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) voter registration transactions that didn’t fully transfer into the State’s TEAM system," she said via a prepared statement sent out by the county. "While that number may seem high, the Elections team is already hard at work reviewing every application and will be extending hours to make sure all records are updated well before early voting begins."
TEAM stands for Texas Election Administration Management, a system used by the state and several counties for voter registration. The system has had its challenges, with Bexar County officials last year citing frustrations with the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.
Earlier this year, one million Texans found their voter registration listed as ‘suspense’ causing alarm about eligibility to vote in the November election. Carew said in her statement that if that suspense designation was possibly due to driver’s license updates, it would be addressed.
“If a voter is currently on suspense status and they submitted a new address during their DPS transaction, their voter record will be updated, and they will be removed from the suspense list,” she added.
In January, the Bexar County Elections office completed a backlog of 7,000 voter registrations. And that was after a previous backlog before the November 2025 election where more than 75,000 registrations were updated.
In both cases, county officials blamed those backlogs on software issues with the Secretary of State’s office.
This latest batch of backlogged registrations comes less than two weeks before the voter registration deadline on Oct. 5. Voters in Texas must be registered by that date in order to vote in November.
