About 35,000 Montgomery County voter registrations delayed by a state computer glitch will be processed before the Tuesday, Nov. 3 election.

The Texas Secretary of State's Office confirmed the fix on Wednesday, Sept. 30, resolving an 11-month backlog that kept approximately 178,000 registrations statewide from reaching county election offices, Fox 26 Houston reported. A third-party vendor's software update broke the transfer system at the Texas Department of Public Safety in October 2025.

The Secretary of State's Office said corrected voter files were sent to counties on Sept. 18 and that grant funding is being distributed to help cover the cost of extra staff needed to work through the pile. The office did not specify the dollar amount.

Montgomery County Elections Administrator Suzie Harvey said her office received approximately 34,780 records to process, though that figure may include duplicates, according to the San Antonio Express-News. The backlogged records include both new registrations and updates such as address changes.

Harvey said in a Sept. 26 statement that county election officials were working extended hours to process valid registrations before the deadline.

For Woodlands-area residents who registered through DPS, the effective date of a registration is the day the voter registered with DPS. Anyone who registered before the Monday, Oct. 5 deadline will be eligible to vote, the Secretary of State's Office said.

Voters who do not appear on the rolls but registered through DPS can cast a provisional ballot. Election officials have a verification process with DPS to confirm the transaction, and if confirmed, the vote will count.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston Republican who represents District 7, said in a Sept. 28 post on X that he spoke directly with Secretary of State Robert Howden about the error. Bettencourt said counties are working in "bipartisan unanimity" to update their rolls by the deadline and that Howden is helping secure funding for counties that need it.

In an earlier interview with Houston Public Media on Sept. 25, Bettencourt criticized the Secretary of State's Office for not catching the problem sooner. "If the files were received, pulled, or not, that should have been noticeable," he said. "They should have caught it."

The DPS error was first reported by the nonprofit news organization Votebeat, according to CW39. A DPS investigation found that the vendor updated its software in October 2025, causing portions of registration records to be cut off before they reached the Secretary of State's system. The state confirmed the problem was not with its voter registration system, known as TEAM (Texas Election Administration Management), or its developer Civix.

Residents can check their registration status at votetexas.gov or at the Montgomery County Elections website, elections.mctx.org. Anyone whose status is unverified can submit a paper application to the county elections office at 501 N. Thompson, 4th Floor, Suite 402, in Conroe before Oct. 5. If a duplicate record is created, county staff will merge the files automatically.

Early voting runs Monday, Oct. 19 through Friday, Oct. 30.