Greg Abbott is tied with Gina Hinojosa four days before Texas starts voting, the first Democrat with a real shot at the governor's office since Ann Richards. Abbott's appointees run the voter rolls, and two of them are in court over 593,000 registrations the state's portal failed to send for a year.
University of Texas pollsters put her up by one on Wednesday, a tie. Three pollsters since mid-September had her ahead by one to three; Fox News had Abbott by five. Abbott answered that "polls don't win elections, and polls are often wrong." His campaign put $12 million into ads against her that day. In the Senate race, James Talarico raised a record $64 million in a quarter against Ken Paxton.
You renew your driver's license online, tick the box, and the Department of Public Safety sends your registration on to the secretary of state and your county. Texas signed a federal settlement in 2021 promising that. From October 2025 DPS stopped sending them. DPS blames a vendor's "programming change" and says it fixed it Sept. 13. For 11 months Texans ticked the box and nothing moved.
DPS had warning. In March it counted 992 voter complaints in an internal email. On July 17 Abbott made his senior adviser Robert Howden secretary of state, the state's chief election officer. On July 23 the voters' lawyers sent the state a breach demand. On Aug. 6 DPS wrote back that it was "in full compliance" and "consistently and timely transmits" registrations. In mid-September the counties found the gap: more than 500,000 by the state's count, 593,000 by the count of the voters' lawyers.
On the backlog, Abbott did one thing in public: point at his own appointees. Asked Sept. 24 whether he had given DPS any direction, his office sent reporters to DPS and the secretary of state. Twelve Democratic state senators asked him the next day to extend the registration deadline; seven counties had already received 178,000 late records. He did not. The deadline held Oct. 5.
On Oct. 9 the League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas sued Howden and the DPS director in Bexar County state court, writing that they "cannot take Defendants at their word." Late Wednesday Howden's office and the county election officials said the counties had cleared it. The plaintiffs say voters still hit problems. Anyone missing from the roll can vote provisionally; Howden's office says your registration dates from the day you ticked the box, so nobody should lose a vote.
