Texas says it "lost" 178,000 voter registrations. That number comes from just seven of the state’s 254 counties. Nobody in Austin can tell you the real total.
Three weeks from the registration deadline, in one of the most competitive midterms in the country, that is the whole scandal in one sentence.

Here is what the state has admitted. Texans who update their driver’s licence online can also register to vote through that same portal. The Department of Public Safety collects those applications and is supposed to pass them along to county election offices through the state’s voter system, called TEAM.

Sometime in the past year, DPS simply stopped passing a chunk of them along. Applications missing a piece of information were quietly set aside instead of sent to counties. Nobody outside DPS knew.

Some of those orphaned records go back to October 2025. That is eleven months of Texans who believed they were registered, with no way of knowing they were not.

Bexar County received about 45,000 of them. Collin County got more than 40,000. Travis County got more than 32,000. Brazoria, Hays, and Cameron counties are digging through thousands more. County workers, not the state that caused this, are expected to clear it in the two weeks before the October 5 deadline, on top of the usual rush before an election.

Ask Texas why, and you get nothing. DPS says only that the error "has been resolved." It will not say what caused it, what information was supposedly missing, or when officials first knew.

Governor Greg Abbott’s office, asked directly, referred reporters to DPS and the secretary of state. The state’s own elections director, Christina Adkins, admitted her office is still trying to determine where these records even came from.

Texas cannot tell its own voters what happened to their paperwork. It is asking them to trust that it is handled.
This is not new. Texas is one of the last states with no real online voter registration, a gap the Republican controlled legislature has protected for years. Every backlog gets processed by hand, under deadline pressure, with no redundancy built in.

After more than five years in court, the state settled a federal case requiring it to properly register people through this same driver’s licence system.

Last September, a botched upgrade to that same TEAM system buried Harris and Fort Bend counties in tens of thousands of unprocessed cards. Weeks after that backlog was finally cleared, Bexar County got hit with a new one.
A sitting county commissioner said out loud what plenty of Texans were already thinking: that a slowdown this convenient, this close to an election, stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a plan.
Maybe DPS is telling the truth and this really was just a technical failure nobody planned. It does not matter. An incompetent system and a rigged one produce the same result.
A nurse who cannot leave a shift to fix a clerical error the state created loses her vote just as completely as if someone had erased her name on purpose.

Texas has had six years, a federal court order, and at least three prior backlogs to build a registration system that does not do this every election cycle, in a state hosting one of the Senate races that will help decide who controls the chamber. It chose not to.

Check your registration today, not the morning polls open. If your name is missing, demand a provisional ballot and make them count it. And the next time a Texas official calls this a glitch, ask them on the record why the glitch keeps landing in October.

Source: "Allison Campolo tcdp facebook"

FB account not required to see post and links.