DPS System Issue Delayed Voter Registration Records

The Texas Department of Public Safety has addressed a system issue that caused some voter registration records from online transactions to be incomplete and prevented those files from being transmitted to counties for review.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Elections Division notified county election and voter registration officials Sept. 22 that DPS had identified the incomplete records and that the two agencies had worked together to resolve the issue and determine which records were affected. The Secretary of State’s Office said the records would then be transmitted to counties.

The state has not publicly identified the technical cause of the problem or specified what information was missing from the records. The Elections Division said DPS made modifications to its system to address the issue and that officials were working to ensure those changes were not affecting daily files going forward.

The problem had surfaced earlier in September. In a Sept. 16 notice, the Elections Division said Civix had alerted the state to an issue involving DPS files. Counties also reported that older DPS registrations were appearing on their dashboards. The state asked Civix to temporarily remove the files while officials investigated the source and scope of the affected records.

The Secretary of State’s Office is handling the affected records differently depending on how counties manage voter registration data. For counties that operate directly in the state system, officials identified voters who had submitted more recent registration updates and withheld older DPS records that could interfere with those changes.

Counties using third-party voter registration vendors are receiving all affected DPS records because the state said it could not conduct the same comparison for those jurisdictions. Those counties were advised to review the records to ensure an earlier DPS transaction does not overwrite or otherwise affect a more recent update. The state said the records would be delivered in batches and that it would coordinate with county vendors on file sizes.

The notices establish that the incident involved DPS system processing and the transfer of voter registration information to county election systems, but they do not provide a statewide count of affected records or say how long the underlying system issue persisted.

The Secretary of State’s Office also has not disclosed which component of the DPS system produced the incomplete records or how the problem was detected internally. Those details remain unresolved in the public notices released so far.