As in many states, Texans can register to vote or update their registration when they renew their driver’s license or get a new one.
But the state of Texas blamed a software glitch related to that system for more than half a million voter registration delays. The extensive backlog of voter registration applications that reportedly began accumulating a year ago is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by several voter advocacy groups: the League of Women Voters Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund. The state says it has already fixed the issue and submitted the request.
The suit characterizes the delay as part of a pattern of voter suppression that has disenfranchised voters in Texas. Filed in Bexar County, Texas, the process named Texas Secretary of State Robert S. Howden in his office, as well as the Department of Public Safety and its director Freeman F. Martin.
Meanwhile, the Texas Secretary of State’s office told the media this week that the late applications had been submitted to the voters’ home districts and that the problem had been fixed. As a safety measure, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State said that anyone still affected by the problem can submit a provisional ballot. But according to a report by the Texas Tribune, county officials found another system error caused problems with another 15,000 registrations last month.
Now counties are scrambling to fix those issues before the start of early voting in the state on Oct. 19 for a high-profile midterm election season that has put the state in the national spotlight. Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, told the Tribune: “Just when most counties have seen the light at the end of the tunnel, another unexpected setback is being dropped on county voter registrars.”
Representatives for the secretary of state’s office and the DPS office did not immediately return a request for comment.
Heated election season, unanswered questions
The state has not provided details about what technical problem caused the voter registration backlog in the first place. It was initially attributed to a “computer error,” but later reports have the Secretary of State describing it as a programming error that arrived in a software update to the DPS driver’s license online portal.
The registration issues come five years after voting groups won a lawsuit against the state that forced it to comply with the National Voter Registration Act, which guarantees the right to vote while updating a driver’s license online.
The new suit alleges that the registration delays are a violation of those safeguards.
Texas has been a reliably red state for years, but polls put several Republican candidates behind Democratic challengers this year, most notably a US Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and State Representative James Talarico.
This race in particular has been contested so hard that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, spent almost 160 million dollars to support Republican candidates in the state. The large amount of money in Texas races and the unpredictability of the results are drawing more scrutiny on potential voter suppression in the state.