Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth was discouraged, to say the least, when she found out late last month that the Texas Department of Public Safety neglected to send tens of thousands of voter registration applications and updates submitted through an online portal to county voter registrars.
Hudspeth is not the voter registrar — that responsibility belongs to Tax Assessor-Collector Annette Ramirez — but whether or not people are able to vote most certainly falls under Hudspeth’s purview.
“It’s definitely unsettling when something like this comes up and you’re within a 90-day window of an election,” Hudspeth says. “We’re always on high alert, and the first thing you do when you hear something like this is get on the phone with the Secretary of State to find out what we are doing next.”
Ramirez did just that and assigned her most experienced staffers to review the more than 108,000 Harris County voter registration records sent by DPS in late September. Some of the records, submitted while people were renewing their driver’s licenses, were almost a year old. They weren’t distributed immediately because of a software bug, state officials have said.
Harris and all the other Texas counties faced a tight deadline to get the updated rolls to the Secretary of State’s Office before the October 5 registration deadline.
Ramirez’s team got it all done in less than a week, and when the Houston Press asked the voter registrar if she’s confident the election will go smoothly, she said, “I’m confident that our voter rolls are accurate. I’m confident that if a voter shows up at the polls and they have an issue with their voter registration, between my office and the clerk’s office, we’re going to be able to walk through that with them and help them get it resolved.”
“Our motto is putting the voter first,” Ramirez added. “We are going to make sure our voters have the least amount of hurdles as possible. Sometimes there are glitches, but we’re going to work through those and do everything we can so voters can cast a ballot.”
It’s already been a challenging year with President Donald Trump attempting to put the U.S. Postal Service in charge of mail-in ballots and withhold public safety funds if counties didn’t revert to hand-marked ballots and use the error-prone SAVE system to verify citizenship. Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin sued the federal government over both proposals, as did several other governmental entities, and both measures were blocked by federal courts.
Hudspeth acknowledges that there are politicians who appear to want to make it more difficult to vote. “We have to be focused on what the election law is and follow that. We have to drown out the noise and do our jobs,” she says. “This is part of what discourages voters and creates intimidation when you’re attempting to change laws within 100 days of an election taking place.”
Confusion about voter registration lingers, and rumors are rampant that ICE agents will be posted at polling locations to intimidate people. A task force including representatives from Kamin’s office, District Attorney Sean Teare’s office and Hudspeth’s office has been meeting weekly to ensure that “election integrity is protected,” Hudspeth says.
Harris County has also been randomly selected for an audit by the state, and, to even a casual observer, it often seems like Texas’ Republican leaders, who have heavily criticized Harris County elections in the past, are looking for Hudspeth to trip up.
The clerk says that’s not going to happen.
“The state of Texas loves to harass this county clerk but I’ve got news for them. I pack a mighty punch and I’ll be ready to continue to guard the gates of democracy,” she says.
What If There’s a Problem?
While Hudspeth is confident, she’s also realistic. She says there will be people who show up to the polls whose names were purged from the voter registration list because they haven’t cast ballots in the last two federal elections and didn’t respond to warning letters saying they would be removed.
“It happens in every election cycle but you see it more in the presidential midterm elections because people come out to vote who maybe haven’t voted in a while,” she says.
When people are told they’re not on the list, many demand a provisional ballot. They’ll be given one, Hudspeth says, but it won’t count. The best outcome in that scenario is that they’ll be able to register on-site for the next election. Poll workers are trained to handle such issues, but if a person is told they’re not on the list of active registered voters and they believe that they are, they should ask the worker to call the voter registrar’s office.
Then there is the matter of the 200,000 Harris County residents who ended up on the Texas Secretary of State’s “voter suspense list.”
The list has been in place for years and it doesn’t mean that a voter has been dropped from the registration rolls; it usually means that a piece of government mail, like a jury summons, was returned so the voter is flagged as possibly needing to update an address. Some voters, however, including Justice of the Peace Dolores Lozano, reported that they showed up on the suspense list even though they hadn’t moved recently.
When Harris County officials began raising awareness last month about the suspense list, thousands checked their registration and many completed an updated residency form. Hudspeth emphasizes that those who didn’t take care of a suspense list issue prior to the October 5 registration deadline can still do so at the polls and vote with a regular electronic ballot. If someone has, for example, moved from Harris County Precinct 2 to Precinct 4, their ballot will be based on the older address, Hudspeth says.
“People are sharing in their [social media] stories, ‘Don’t leave without asking for a provisional ballot.’ If you’re an active voter, you need to vote a regular ballot,” Hudspeth says.
Voters can check their registration at Harrisvotes.com or on the new Harris Votes mobile smartphone application. An online portal is also available for Fort Bend County voters and Montgomery County voters to check their status, and anyone can check on votetexas.com.
Thousands of mail-in ballots have been distributed and some are already being returned to Hudspeth’s office for processing. Voters who want to submit a ballot by mail but haven’t received one or have questions about their registration should contact Hudspeth’s office. The deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot is October 23.
If someone who is not registered requests a mail-in ballot, the application will be rejected and the ballot won’t be sent. Texas law allows an exception if election officials can verify that a voter registration application was submitted prior to the deadline and it will become effective by Election Day.
Those who have requested a mail-in ballot and are on the suspense list can still vote by mail but must complete a Statement of Residence form.
Early voting begins October 19 and runs through October 30. Election Day is November 3.
“I’m encouraging voters to not wait until the last minute, to vote early, especially if you’re not sure about your voter registration,” Hudspeth says. “There’s a chance you could get some things done or corrected during the early voting period rather than waiting until Election Day, when it’s too late.”
Updating the Voter Rolls
Ramirez didn’t get a special heads-up that 108,000 new voter records would be headed her way from the DPS after a software bug was identified. She found out when everyone else did, on September 22, just two weeks before the voter registration deadline.
Her office had all the DPS files by the end of the day on September 23, and Ramirez directed staff members to shut off their phones, “hunker down,” and sort through the applications, 33,000 of which turned out to be duplicates. More than 11,000 had to be manually reviewed.
Because some of the DPS records dated back to November 2025, Ramirez’s staff had to cross-check to make sure more recent information hadn’t been submitted by the same voter.
While plenty of finger-pointing occurred when the DPS glitch was made public, Ramirez explained that she had no way of knowing that she wasn’t getting all the registration data.
“Throughout ‘25 and ‘26 we were receiving DPS files but apparently they weren’t sending all of them,” she says. “We get what we get and we process them. This wasn’t a Harris County problem. It was a statewide problem. It happened to every single county.”
Once Ramirez’s staff imported all the DPS registrations, they sent the information to the Secretary of State’s Office, which verifies criminal history and whether someone has died, and “they do what they do to verify citizenship,” Ramirez says. “Then they assign that voter a unique voter ID number and they send that back to us. The voter is then active in our system.”
If someone has registered but their status online says “pending,” it probably means the voter ID hasn’t come back from the state yet, Ramirez says. They should still show up to vote, and the issue can be resolved at the polls, she says.
Ramirez jokingly refers to her position as the “sexiest” elected office in the county, noting that the tax office doesn’t have thousands of social media followers and most people just think that’s where they pay their property taxes and get their vehicle registration.
Despite not being as popular on Instagram as some other elected officials, Ramirez acknowledges the importance of the voter registrar, particularly in the largest county in Texas. The Harris County voter roll includes about 2.7 million people. In addition to getting voter registrations from DPS, they come in from volunteer deputy registrars and electronic and paper files from the Texas Secretary of State.
“We’re always processing something or updating someone’s record,” Ramirez says. “We have people turning 18. We have people passing away. We’ve got people moving in and out of Harris County. In any single year, we’re doing about 500,000 updates in our system.”
When the state redistricts its congressional boundaries, as it did last year, Ramirez’s office has to update the rolls to ensure that someone who was previously in Congressional District 9 and is now in CD 18, for example, gets the right ballot.
A Dallas Morning News report published October 5 pointed out that election officials across the state have criticized the “unreliable and error-prone” Texas Election Administration Management system, rolled out last year by Louisiana-based Civix.
Fortunately, Ramirez says, Harris County doesn’t use Civix; it has a third-party vendor to manage voter registration and elections through a system called VEMACS, which was first put in place when now-Senator Paul Bettencourt had Ramirez’s job in the early 2000s.
“The state system hasn’t been working, but luckily for us, our voter roll is our own. It’s on our own network. It’s on our own servers. When we update our system, we know that it’s accurate, and of course, that’s the same list that Clerk Hudspeth is using,” Ramirez says.
Trained and Ready
Hudspeth and Ramirez warn that the Harris County ballot is one of the longest in the nation, with an average of about 100 contests, depending on where the voter lives. Hudspeth is encouraging voters to stick with the ballot until the end.
“Don’t vote the top of the ticket and then abandon the bottom,” she says. “The bottom is where your most local officials are. You can take your written sample ballot with you or any written materials, but unfortunately you can’t use your cell phone.”
Hudspeth is on the ballot, facing Republican Mike Wolfe; Ramirez isn’t up for re-election until November 2028.
Between now and Election Day, both offices, each of which has more than 400 employees, are conducting weekly meetings to review election operations and plan for the audit. “We’re on top of it,” Ramirez says.
Both officials have said they’re not worried about the state audit. “We know that eyes are always on Harris County,” Ramirez says. “We know what’s at risk. We also know that we do a good job. This is an opportunity for our offices to show that there’s nothing to worry about in Harris County. We are the most audited county in the state, and we’re doing it right.”
Hudspeth says Harris County doesn’t have a registration problem; it has a turnout problem, so she’s working to educate voters and ensure that information is accessible. The mobile app shows voters the closest polling location and wait time. Users can sign up for push notifications to receive election results on November 3.
“We’re working overtime in our offices to make sure voters feel prepared, to the best of our abilities,” Hudspeth says. “You’re not going to reach every single person but we make sure there are more than enough polling locations. We make sure election workers are trained and fully prepared for operations. Sometimes the bad stuff circulates more than the good stuff, but we’re working to get the good stuff out.”
