A computer error caused a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in Texas, sending election workers scrambling to process them before early voting starts on Monday, county election officials said.
The backlog of nearly 600,000 applications stemmed from a glitch in software run by the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to a lawsuit filed last week by voting rights groups. They accused the agency, as well as the secretary of state, who serves as Texas’ chief election officer, of failing to to maintain a reliable online voter registration system.
The backlog in a state that is home to one of the year’s most competitive U.S. Senate races raised concerns nationally. Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat from California and the ranking member of the Senate Rules Committee, which oversees federal elections, issued a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Secretary of State Robert Howden last month demanding an explanation of the scope and cause of the failure.
“Every eligible voter should be able to cast their ballots and have their ballots counted, period,” Mr. Padilla said in an interview.
The backlog appeared to have been mostly cleared by Wednesday, according to county election officials, several of whom said there was little risk that Texans who tried to register would be unable to vote. But some voting advocates said they worried that the episode might discourage voters from turning out at all.
The lawsuit, filed last week in Bexar County, demanded that the error be fixed. It cited previous legal action that resulted in a settlement in 2021 in which Texas agreed with voting rights groups to offer residents the option of online voter registration.
The lawsuit, which named Mr. Howden and Freeman F. Martin, director of the Department of Public Safety, among its defendants, said the backlog had resulted from a programming error on a website for driver’s license applications that was also supposed to allow applicants to register to vote.
Because of the error, voters who checked “yes” to register to vote between December 2025 and February 2026 received a receipt confirming their choice, but their data was never recorded, the lawsuit said.
“We need to get to the bottom of what exactly happened,” Rochelle Garza, president of the Texas Civil Rights Project, the nonpartisan group litigating the case, said in an interview on Wednesday. “The only way to do that is through litigation.”
Ms. Garza said she hoped the suit, brought by the League of Women Voters Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund and reported earlier by the nonprofit news organization Votebeat, would help determine whether the error was introduced intentionally or by mistake.
Texas counties have worked diligently to clear the backlog, said Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state. Voters who thought they had registered but who do not appear on the rolls could cast provisional ballots, she added.
The Texas Department of Public Safety declined to discuss pending litigation.
Voter registration applications were sent to counties in bulk last month, overwhelming election officials with a crush of processing work ahead of the start of early voting on Monday. Some of the applications dated to last year, voting rights groups said.
“The timing of that backlog hit really hard, because that was when we should’ve been in a position to start preparing for early voting,” Kristin Miles, president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in an interview.
Ms. Miles, who is also the election administrator for Bastrop County, about 30 miles southeast of Austin, said she had worked nights and weekends along with her staff of four full-time employees to clear thousands of applications. Larger counties hired workers to ease the workload.
Adding to the burden, some voters who heard about the glitch registered anew to be sure they would be able to vote in the midterms, she said.
The secretary of state offered to reimburse any additional costs that counties incurred, including overtime and hiring of temporary workers.
The backlog put a spotlight on the companies that supply the software behind the election management systems in Texas: Civix, a Louisiana-based vendor for the Office of the Secretary of State, and Deloitte.
Paul Bettencourt, a state senator in Texas who previously worked for a decade as a voter registrar in Harris County, which is home to Houston, said the backlog had resulted from a system upgrade carried out by Deloitte. He said state government officials had failed to catch the problem right away.
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