Bexar County’s top election official said Saturday that a state error stopped more than 45,000 people’s voter registration applications from reaching her office in the past year.
Some of the applications date back to last October — meaning some Bexar County residents who followed the legal steps to register likely had their ballots rejected in recent elections, including in the March primaries.
Carew said her office will determine how many of the backlogged applications match up with rejected ballots, but she doesn’t believe those votes would have been enough to change the outcome of any races.
“There wasn’t anything that close in Bexar County,” Carew said.
The issue pertains to applications that were submitted online through the Department of Public Safety, meaning people who registered to vote at the same time they were receiving, renewing or updating their driver’s licenses.
That’s just one of many ways people can register to vote in Texas, but it affected about 178,000 applications across a state with more than 18 million registered voters.
Like her counterparts in other counties, Elections Administrator Michele Carew said she received notice of the issue on Sept. 23.
Now her office is working overtime to ensure the applications are processed in time for the Nov. 3 midterm election, but the issue likely caused some ballots to be rejected in prior elections.
“Over the last year and through now five elections, we’ve had voters who have come in to vote, who are not on our list, who stated that they registered to vote at the [Department of Public Safety], whether it be online or in-person,” Carew said at the Texas Tribune Festival on Saturday.
“We reached out to DPS, they told us no they didn’t [register] … [and] now we’re finding there’s 45,000 people who could have been affected, who submitted a provisional ballot and whose ballot was rejected for not registering in time.”
Since the issue first cropped up, Texas voters have had a November 2025 state constitutional amendment election, a March midterms primary election, a May municipal election, a May midterms primary runoff election and a June municipal runoff election.
Once a voter casts a provisional ballot, they’re automatically registered to vote for the next election.
That means anyone whose ballot was rejected in a previous election is already in the system for this November’s midterm, but Carew said she continues to receive additional backlogged applications since the first batch from DPS.
“They’re still finding them and bringing them over to the portals,” Carew said. “So 45,000 was just the beginning number.”
Oct. 5 is the voter registration deadline for the Nov. 3 election.
You can check your voter registration status online here.
All told, the crew of voting experts on Saturday’s panel said the public should still feel confident about counties’ ability to run fair elections, in spite of the challenges they face.
For example, Carew said earlier this year that her office was dealing with a state voter registration system that told people their ballots weren’t counted, when they actually had been, in recent elections.
“Even though we show that we received an application, we mailed them a ballot, the ballot came back, and the ballot was counted, it’s not reflected in TEAM,” Carew said in an Aug. 24 interview. “We’re wanting to build voter confidence, but TEAM has destroyed the voter confidence that’s in place.”
To increase voter trust, this year Carew is adding cameras to livestream the entire life of a ballot, from the time it arrives to the time it’s counted.
“We’re trying to be more transparent now more than ever, just because of the fact that voters are really having a hard time believing that their vote counts,” Carew said Saturday.
“We put a lot of effort, not just following the Texas Election Code, but taking it a step further to open our doors, to answer the hard questions, and to help build up voter confidence again.”
Texas election officials are also trying to quell concerns about a voter “suspense list,” which flags people who may have recently moved but not updated their addresses.
Carew said the practice is standard operating procedure to maintain the voter rolls, and people put on the suspense list are still able to participate in this November’s election.
They can either confirm their address before the Oct. 5 deadline, or they’ll simply be asked to fill out an extra form when they go to vote.
“Something that we’ve been trying to get across to the voters is: ‘Don’t freak out [about the suspense list],'” she said. “When you come to vote, you’re not going to vote provisionally, you’re going to vote a regular ballot after you complete a statement of residence.”
