Two voting rights groups have gone to court over hundreds of thousands of Texans who tried to register to vote while updating a driver's license online and whose applications were never processed, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat reported Wednesday.
The League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund are asking a state district judge to enforce a 2021 settlement in which Texas agreed to keep offering voter registration through the Department of Public Safety's online driver's license portal. Their suit says more than 500,000 registration applications submitted through that portal went unprocessed.
How the backlog surfaced
Last month, DPS and the Texas Secretary of State's Office sent county election officials a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records and updates that had been held up by a software update error in the DPS portal, according to the report. At least 500,000 of the records dated back to October 2025.
Election officials have also said problems with the secretary of state's voter registration system, called TEAM, made it harder to clear the backlog.
The lawsuit says some voters are still having trouble with their registrations ahead of the Nov. 3 election. It argues that the state has been in breach of the settlement "since at least October 2025" and points to a provision allowing a new suit if technical or other system problems stop the simultaneous registration process from working.
