Katy-area voters who registered or updated their information through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) website may not be on the rolls for the Nov. 3 election. A software error left more than 75,000 Harris County voter registration records unprocessed for nearly a year, and the registration deadline is Monday, Oct. 5.
Katy sits partly in Harris County, putting local voters who used the DPS online portal squarely in the affected group. The statewide problem, first reported by the Texas Tribune, traces to a third-party vendor's software update in October 2025 that cut off parts of records submitted through DPS's driver's license services. The incomplete data never reached county registrars.
Check now. Harris County voters can verify their registration at VoteTexas.gov or HCTAX.NET, or call 713-274-VOTE (8683). Help is available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese.
How Harris County is responding
Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Annette Ramirez said her office received about 108,000 backlogged records starting Sept. 22, KPRC 2 reported. Roughly 33,000 were duplicates, leaving more than 75,000 to process. Those numbers represent records, not a confirmed count of individual voters.
Changes to existing registrations that could be handled immediately are done and active, according to Ramirez's office. About 11,000 records still need a closer look because staff could not match them to an existing voter.
"But what I want the voters of Harris County to know is that we are staffed up and we were ready to handle this," Ramirez told KPRC 2.
Her team expects to finish all remaining records before early voting begins Monday, Oct. 19. The Secretary of State's office is offering grant funding to help counties cover extra staffing costs.
Safety net for affected voters
The Secretary of State's office told KPRC 2 that an eligible voter whose qualifying DPS transaction occurred on or before Oct. 5 will be considered timely registered for the Nov. 3 election, even if the record is processed later.
Voters who do not appear on the rolls at the polls can cast a provisional ballot. Poll workers can contact Ramirez's office to research the record with DPS and update the county system in real time.
Karla Maradiaga, a voting rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, recommended that voters who still need to resolve a registration issue before the deadline visit their county voter registrar's office and submit a paper form to avoid further technology problems.
Broader fallout
Statewide, officials in seven of Texas's 254 counties had confirmed receiving a combined 178,000-plus backlogged records as of Sept. 25, the Texas Tribune reported. No statewide count of unique affected voters has been released. DPS referred questions to the Secretary of State's office, which referred them back to DPS.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, told the Tribune the Secretary of State's office should have caught the error sooner because it oversees the system counties use to receive files from DPS.
Early voting opens Oct. 19.
