Texas Says It’s Fixed a Glitch That Delayed Nearly 600,000 Voter Registrations
Programming issues and software updates have been blamed for delays in getting hundreds of thousands of people registered to vote.
Texas claims to have resolved a technical issue that caused a backlog of nearly 600,000 voter registrations to be delayed. The backlog began accumulating last year and is now being challenged in a lawsuit filed by the League of Women Voters Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund. The state maintains that the issue has been fixed and all the applications have been processed.
However, a separate report from The Texas Tribune indicates that a new system error has caused an additional 15,000 registrations to be delayed in the past month. This has left county officials scrambling to rectify the problem before early voting begins on October 19th. The cause of the original backlog is currently unknown, although it was initially referred to as a "computer glitch" and later described as a programming error in a software update for the DPS driver’s license online portal.
The voter registration issue has surfaced just five years after a similar lawsuit forced the state to comply with the National Voter Registration Act. The current lawsuit asserts that the registration delays constitute a violation of these protections. Texas, a traditionally Republican stronghold, is seeing increased competition this election cycle, with several races between Republican and Democratic candidates, including a highly contentious US Senate race between Attorney General Ken Paxton and State Representative James Talarico.
The involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in backing Republican candidates has added further intrigue to the political landscape.
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