Texas Secretary of State sends 15,000 voter registrations to counties after software error

The Texas Secretary of State's office said a software error caused about 15,000 voter registrations to be sent back to counties. The glitch affected voters who updated their names and addresses on texas.gov between Sept. 1 and last week.

County election officials must process the records before early voting begins Monday, Oct. 19. The issue follows a separate backlog involving more than 500,000 registrations caused by a Texas Department of Public Safety software update.

The error stemmed from "an extra address validation" on the state's government record portal, texas.gov, according to an email sent by the Secretary of State's office on Thursday. Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the agency, said the issue was discovered and resolved and that voters will still be able to cast a ballot.

The Texas Association of County Election Officials initially estimated more than 5,200 voter registration applications across at least four counties. The group said 3,000 were in Bexar County, 400 in Hays, 700 in Williamson and 1,100 in Travis.

Many of those updated records were still missing voters' new addresses, the association said in an email shared with The Texas Newsroom. Pierce could not confirm which specific counties were impacted.

Before early voting begins Monday morning, county officials must determine which registrations were submitted by the state's Oct. 5 deadline and add those to the Official List of Registered Voters.

"It's just shifting county resources away from preparation for early voting to now working through additional timely voter registration applications that we just now received," said Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County Elections Administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials.

Bastrop County received notice of 70 affected records Thursday, Miles said. Although dozens were processed that night, she said 30 were incomplete because voters' updated addresses did not come through TEAM, the state's voter registration system.

The county is waiting on a response from the Secretary of State's office on how to move forward, Miles said.

County officials have long said they struggle with the TEAM system, which administrators describe as prone to issues and delays in processing voter registrations.

This latest problem came days after Texas election officials said they cleared an earlier voter registration backlog. That issue was caused by an error prompted by a Texas Department of Public Safety software update and impacted more than 500,000 voter registrations submitted since October 2025.

Voters should receive registration certificates in the mail after updating their names or addresses. Any Texan who wants to verify whether a change was processed can check online at votetexas.gov or contact their county voter registrar.

Early voting runs from Oct. 19 to Oct. 30. Election Day is Nov. 3.