In Texas, tens of thousands of voter registration applications have yet to be processed. They’re caught in a backlog after the Texas Department of Public Safety failed to send counties updated information on time.
Last week, Texas counties started receiving old applications en masse. Travis County received 32,000 records from DPS overnight. In Bexar County, the tally was 45,000. In Harris County it was 75,000.
So what do you do if you’re worried your voter registration might be affected?
The first step would be to check on the secretary of state’s website to see if your information is up to date.
If your information is incorrect, the fastest way to update it is by submitting a form at VoteTexas.gov. To do this, you need your social security number, your driver’s license and your Voter Unique Identifier number. This last one can be found on your Voter Registration Certificate.
You might be thinking to yourself, “if the county’s still working through its backlog, would it be a problem if my request was in there twice?” Celia Israel, Travis County’s voter registrar, said that is not an issue.
“If you’re in doubt, if you’re concerned, there’s no harm in submitting another form, a second form,” she said. “We will check for duplicates and all of the things that we’re doing. That’s part of our job as the voter registrar.”
If you’re not sure, it’s important to check now. Monday, Oct. 5 is the deadline for updating your voter registration. You can do it online, but Israel says at this point, if you plan to fill out a paper form, don’t send it by mail.
“Drop it off at one of our offices and make sure that we have your correct information,” she said.
It’s still not entirely clear how we got here. Natalia Contreras, a reporter for VoteBeat, said she’s still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong and what’s been done to fix it.
Contreras said the Texas Department of Public Safety noticed an error with a vendor and reported it to the secretary of state in August.
So who should be checking their voter registration to see if they were affected by the backlog? DPS says the issue started in October of 2025. So, Contreras says, if you used the driver’s license portal between then and now, it’s best to check.
“If you renewed your driver’s license and you checked the box that you wanted to register to vote, if you updated your address and you checked the box that you want to register to vote, you should definitely check your voter registration status and make sure that you’re good to go,” Contreras said.
And if you run into any issues or need additional information, Israel says the best move is to call your local county voter registrar for help. She also says the DPS system is back up and running normally, so this shouldn’t be a problem again.
In the meantime, Israel recommends reminding your family and friends to check their voter registrations.
“The more that people have these conversations with folks that they interact with before next Monday, the better,” she said. “I don’t want people to wake up in the middle of early voting and say, man, I didn’t know that I could have been registered to vote.”
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