Texas election officials are facing a lawsuit over a backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registration applications, and the timing could not be worse. Early voting was set to open on Monday.
The legal challenge, filed last week by the League of Women Voters of Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund, says a state computer system failure kept DPS from sending almost 600,000 voter registrations to the SOS for local county registrars to process. The suit seeks records showing what went wrong and asks a court to require proof of compliance within one month.
That makes the dispute immediate, not theoretical. Some of the delayed registrations stretch back as far as October 2025, and the lawsuit says residents between October 2025 and February 2026 who selected yes to register to vote were given receipts confirming that choice even though their registration information was never actually recorded. For voters trying to be ready for the November 2026 election, the gap is the difference between being on the rolls and showing up to find out they are not.
The issue also reaches beyond a single backlog count. The registration problem grew out of a website used for driver’s license applications that was also designed to let Texans register to vote, and the lawsuit names Robert Howden and Freeman F Martin among the defendants. That overlap is what makes the failure so hard to shrug off: a system built to move two routine transactions at once instead appears to have delivered proof of registration without completing the registration itself.
The pressure on state leaders has been building for weeks. Alex Padilla sent a letter to Greg Abbott and Robert Howden last month demanding answers about how the failure happened and how many registrations were affected. Now, with early voting about to begin and counties still trying to sort through the backlog, the question is not whether the system broke. It is how many Eligible Texas voters may walk into the first day of voting still waiting for the state to catch up.
