“What I am trying to figure out right now is what happened, who was in charge of this, and who needs to be held accountable,” Natalia Contreras said.
TARRANT COUNTY, Texas — The folks who work inside the Tarrant County elections office are putting in overtime, lots of it, processing tens of thousands of voter registration applications that were delayed because of a problem involving the Texas Department of Public Safety. This comes just days before the October 5 deadline to register to vote for November’s election.
“I was shocked. And I was more like, why is this happening?” Tarrant County voter Stephanie Graham said.
Graham says she was especially concerned after learning election workers were facing a backlog of about 64,000 voter registration records. She remembers filling out her first voter registration card years ago at the Department of Motor Vehicles as she obtained her driver’s license and became eligible to vote.
“I couldn’t imagine having done that and then finding out that I’m not registered now, especially in this important election,” Graham said.
Last week, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office notified county elections administrators about a problem involving voter registration data. This week, counties began receiving thousands of previously unprocessed voter registration applications and updates that had been submitted through the DPS online driver’s license system.
Votebeat reporter Natalia Contreras first reported on the problem after receiving a tip that state officials were notifying counties about missing voter registration data.
“I got a tip from a source,” Contreras said.
The problem involves voter registration applications and updates that were not sent from DPS to county voter registrars. State officials said some of the records were incomplete, which prevented them from being transmitted to counties.
“As opposed to it being automatic, the DPS clerks still have to enter that data manually,” Contreras said.
Votebeat even discovered the problem is statewide, with counties receiving anywhere from a few hundred records to tens of thousands in the state’s largest counties. Some of the affected records date back to October 2025. Contreras says she has earned the respect of election administrators all across Texas because of her work. That tip lead to her launching her own investigation to the statewide problem.
DPS issued a statement to WFAA on Thursday, Sept. 24:
“In late August, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) proactively identified an issue with its daily batch uploads of online driver license voter registration requests, which sent incomplete information to the Secretary of State (SOS). 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. Because the records were incomplete, the SOS could not process them. After DPS raised the issue, DPS, SOS and the vendor met and resolved the issue on September 13, 2026. DPS then resent the complete records affected by this issue to the SOS for processing. On September 18, 2026, the SOS confirmed receipt of the corrected files.”
In Tarrant County, election administrator Clint Ludwig said in an email that the county received DPS files on September 23 totaling more than 64,000 individual files. Some of those files could be duplicates.
Contreras has seen voter registration applications in the past. But she shared with WFAA TV that she has never seen it on this big of a scale. She is optimistic about the impact it could have on the outcome of the midterm election in Texas she says, especially since it will determine largely on the overall voter turn out.
“What I am trying to figure out right now is what happened, who was in charge of this, and who needs to be held accountable,” Contreras said.
State officials say the older records must be processed carefully to make sure they do not overwrite more recent registration information submitted by the same voters.
Graham says the situation is especially important with the November election approaching.
“Reach out to whichever party you’re affiliated with and check with them, because they have a lot of resources,” Graham said.
Texas’ deadline to register to vote for the November 3 election is October 5. The Secretary of State’s Office also advises voters to check their registration status through www.VoteTexas.gov .