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Last week, Ken Paxton’s office announced that it had teamed up with federal prosecutors, the FBI, and Homeland Security to charge seven people with illegal voting. Seven. In a state with more than 18 million registered voters. At least two of those ballots were rejected and never counted, which means the system they swear is broken actually caught them.
Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Public Safety was sitting on nearly a year of voter registrations it never sent to a single county.
So far, 178,000 from seven counties. A software vendor caught the problem after eleven months. When reporters asked Greg Abbott about it, his office pointed them to DPS and the Secretary of State.
What happened?
Texas does not let you register to vote online. The one exception is the DPS portal. If you renew your driver’s license or change your address online, you can check a box and register at the same time. For about a year, a lot of those boxes went nowhere.
According to the state, some DPS online transactions produced “incomplete” voter registration records. Incomplete records don’t get sent to counties, so they sat. The oldest go back to October 2025.
DPS didn’t flag the problem. On September 16, the Secretary of State’s office emailed county officials that Civix, the vendor behind the state’s voter registration system, had found an issue with DPS files, and counties suddenly saw old DPS registrations appear on their dashboards. The state’s first move was to have Civix pull the files back off those dashboards while it figured out what happened. Six days later, a second email said the records would start moving at 5 p.m. that night. Counties that work directly in the state system got a filtered batch. Counties that use outside vendors got everything and were told to sort it out themselves.
Senator Bettencourt (R-SD07) told the Texas Tribune that the Secretary of State should have caught this problem, but let me remind everyone, this is the system the SOS’s office works on (from 2025):
What DPS won’t tell you.
How did the State of Texas lose nearly a year of voter registrations:
What caused it: No answer.
When it started: No answer. The October 2025 date comes from county officials, not DPS.
How many voters were affected: No answer.
What “incomplete” means: No answer.
DPS sent one statement saying the system issue has been resolved and that the agency worked with the Secretary of State to backfill the missing information. That’s it. That’s the entire accountability report from an agency that needed a software vendor to tell it something was wrong.
Everybody else is pointing at somebody else. Asked whether he was concerned or had given DPS any direction, Greg Abbott referred questions to DPS and the Secretary of State. A commission Abbott appoints oversees DPS. The Secretary of State, Robert Howden, took the job in July. Before that, he was Abbott’s legislative director. When Abbott named him, he promised Howden would protect the integrity of Texas elections. So the governor sent reporters to his own former staffer.
Did this cost anyone a vote in the March primary? Nobody knows. Officials haven’t said whether the error kept any voter from casting a ballot. The records go back to October. The primary was March 3. Nobody at the state has said whether they’ve checked.
The so-called noncitizen hunt.
On September 15, Paxton’s office, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, the FBI, and Homeland Security Investigations announced charges against seven people. All seven are in Tarrant County. Here’s what they’re charged with:
One man voted in 2024. His ballot was rejected.
Another cast a provisional ballot. Also rejected.
A third is charged with lying about his naturalization. He voted illegally in 2018, but the statute of limitations had run out.
The other four are accused of voting illegally in 2024 and lying about their citizenship to register.
That leaves four people accused of casting 2024 ballots that weren’t reported as rejected. Texans cast more than 11 million ballots in November 2024. That’s one accused voter for every 2.75 million ballots. That’s 0.000036%.
Two of those ballots were caught before they counted. The rest got caught after. Nobody got away with anything, which means the system works.
Last October, the Secretary of State’s office sent counties a list of 2,724 “potential noncitizens” pulled from a federal database called SAVE. It never checked those names against DPS records first, even though hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through DPS, which requires proof of citizenship like a passport and keeps copies on file. Voting rights groups sued in March. In May, the state agreed to check the DPS records. In July, it told counties to reinstate citizens wrongly removed from the voter rolls.
This month, the state confirmed 578 of the flagged voters are citizens. 506 of them were flagged because their passport information hadn’t reached the federal database yet when Texas ran its check. On the same day, the state referred 117 cases to Paxton’s office. For every case the state thought was worth sending to the attorney general, it flagged five citizens who had done nothing wrong.
THIS is what thirty years of Republican incompetence looks like.
The state eventually cleared those citizens using DPS records. So DPS data is good enough to prove a Texan is a citizen after the state has already accused them. It just isn’t good enough to get that Texan’s voter registration to their county.
Texas has run this play before. In January 2019, Secretary of State David Whitley announced about 95,000 potential noncitizens on the rolls and said he’d shared the list with Paxton. His office noted that 58,000 of them had voted at some point since 1996, and Republicans, Trump included, turned that into a false claim that 58,000 noncitizens had voted. Paxton jumped on the list as evidence of widespread fraud. Within days, it fell apart. About 25,000 of the roughly 98,000 flagged names were errors, and many more were naturalized citizens. The state settled three federal lawsuits, paid $450,000, and dropped the purge. Whitley resigned when the Senate wouldn’t confirm him.
We’ve seen Republicans do this shit so often, it’s hard to believe it isn’t on purpose.
What happens now?
The Secretary of State’s office says the backlogged records reached counties in time for November 3. Your registration counts from the day of your DPS transaction, not the day some overworked county clerk finally opens it. If that was on or before October 5, you’re covered, even if it gets processed later. And if you show up to vote and you’re not on the rolls, you can cast a provisional ballot. Election officials check with DPS, and if you registered, it counts.
The counties say they’ll handle it. Bexar County is extending hours to update every record before early voting starts. Even Bettencourt says the counties will get it done. They probably will. County election workers have spent years cleaning up after Republicans in this state, and they’re good at it.
But “you can cast a provisional ballot” is a hell of a thing to hear from the people who lost your paperwork.
Check your registration today:
Go to VoteTexas.gov and look yourself up, or call your county voter registrar.
If you’re not on the rolls, register by Monday, October 5. If you mail it, it has to be postmarked by that day.
If you moved, updated your license online, or registered for the first time in the last year, this is who it hit hardest.
Then check your kids. And your grandkids. People in cities move more often, and urban counties are taking the biggest hit.
If you get to the polls and you’re not on the list, don’t leave. Ask for a provisional ballot and tell them you registered through DPS. By law, election officials have to investigate.
Paxton’s office brought in the FBI and Homeland Security to find seven people. The state needed a software vendor to find at least 178,000 records. You’ve got ten days. Go check.
39 days until the November election!
Last Day to Register to Vote: October 5, 2026
First Day of Early Voting: October 19, 2026
Last Day to Apply for Ballot by Mail: October 23, 2026
Last Day of Early Voting: October 30, 2026
Election Day: November 3, 2026
Did you know you can find links to all the previous Meet the Candidate articles on these lists?:
Click here to find out what Legislative districts you’re in.
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I think the play here is to have a whole lot of provisional ballots waiting to be counted in the days after November 3. This is where Trump and MAGA will exploit the lag in receiving results to claim fraud. Therefore, our play is to vote them out so overwhelmingly that counting the provisional ballots won't change the result. The hurdles to beating MAGA just keep getting higher and higher.
The problem it has though is voters have heard all this before. They aren't buying what Republicans are selling anymore. I do not want to jinx things, but I think MAGA is going to lose despite all its maneuvering.
Disgusting. Abbott says check with the Secretary of State whom HE appoints! These MAGATS need to go.