Voters go to the polls in less than a month to cast their ballots in the weighty midterm elections, and this week the state handed down 74,000 backlogged registration forms for Tarrant County to process before early voting begins on Oct. 19.
Tarrant County’s elections staff is working around the clock in an effort to amend the voter registration data issue the Texas Secretary of State’s office notified counties of last week. Some applications have been in limbo since October 2025.
Since Wednesday, about 74,000 individual files have been passed from the Secretary of State’s office to the Tarrant County Elections Administration. Each file does not necessarily represent new voters, as some may be updates to existing voter registration records.
When a Texas resident renews their driver’s license or updates their information on the Department of Public Safety online portal, they have the option to register to vote or update their voter profile as well. A DPS vendor sends that information to the Texas Secretary of State on a daily basis. The Secretary of State then forwards it to the appropriate county for processing.
“A DPS investigation revealed that a third-party vendor, whose software handles these batch transactions, updated its software in October 2025, causing portions of the records to be cut off,” a DPS spokesperson said. “Because the records were incomplete, the SOS could not process them.”
The error was resolved on Sept. 13, but it created a massive backlog of applications that had not been sent to counties until this week.
“Processing this volume of data requires a great deal of resources — people, power and time,” Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig said. “Particularly right now, as we work to keep pace with the high volume of new voter registrations ahead of the Oct. 5 registration deadline for the Nov. 3 Election.”
Tarrant County has already implemented mandatory overtime in the elections administration and is bringing on temporary staff to minimize interruptions to the department’s work.
Texas voters have until Oct. 5 to register to vote.
By Rachel Royster, Fort Worth Star-Telegram