County election officials said that a computer error caused a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations in Texas. While they say they have largely cleared the backlog by Wednesday, the incident still raised concerns and led to a lawsuit from voting groups.
According to The New York Times, 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.
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“Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit said.
“DPS had failed to send almost 600,000 voter registrations to the SOS to distribute to local county registrars, with some delayed voter registrations stretching back as far as October 2025,” it added. “Unexpecting counties must now scramble to process this deluge of last-minute voter registrations ahead of the November 2026 election.”
The lawsuit demanded the error be fixed, and 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.
While county election officials say there was little risk that Texans who tried to register would be unable to vote after the backlog has been cleared, voting advocates are worried that the incident might discourage voters from turning out at all.
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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 asking for an explanation of the scope and cause of the failure.
This incident comes as the state is preparing for one of the most closely contested US Senate elections this year. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton will be facing up against James Talarico, a political newcomer whom Democrats hope will be able to flip Texas longtime red state blue.
It also comes as voting rights advocates warn about what they say is an attempt by the Trump administration to suppress voters. This includes bids to rig electoral maps and threats to deploy federal law enforcement at polling sites, among other actions.