Denton County election workers have cut a backlog of about 42,000 voter registrations sent by the state to roughly 2,500 still waiting to be processed as of Tuesday, and expect to finish before early voting starts Monday, Oct. 19, the Denton Record-Chronicle reported.
The county received the 42,000 registrations from the Texas Department of Public Safety on Sept. 23, after DPS found a software problem in late August that affected at least 200,000 registrations across the state. DPS tied the problem to the daily batches of voter registration requests submitted online through driver's license transactions, saying some records were incomplete and had not been fully sent, according to a Sept. 23 KXAN-TV report. Elections Administrator Frank Phillips said the affected records went back to September 2025.
Phillips said the county's software vendor confirmed that most of the 42,000 people were already registered, which brought the number needing work down to about 9,000 before staff whittled it further.
"There's not a county in the state that wasn't affected," Phillips said. He has run elections since 2009 and said he had never seen anything like it. "I get the feeling that they didn't know what they had sent and what they had not," he said of DPS, because thousands of the records were already in the county's system. He said Collin County saw the same pattern, with its roughly 61,000 DPS registrations reduced to about 9,000.
County Judge Andy Eads did not respond to a request for comment by Wednesday evening. County spokesperson Dawn Cobb said in an email that the county appreciated the state alerting election administrators to the problem. "The County receives daily uploads from DPS and is working on the latest batches in the same way we do every day," she wrote. "Everything will be reconciled and ready for the election."
