LWV Texas and MOVE Texas Sue SOS and DPS in Bexar County (Filed Oct 9): Petition Pleads 'Almost 600,000' DPS Online Voter Registrations Reached Counties Late, Some From Oct 2025, as Breach of the 2021 Stringer II Settlement; State Says Backlog Cleared

Sequence only, with date kinds.

• 2026-10-09 (court filing date, file stamp 12:59 PM): League of Women Voters of Texas and MOVE Texas Civic Fund, represented by the Texas Civil Rights Project and Waters Kraus Paul & Siegel, filed Plaintiffs’ Original Verified Petition in the 224th District Court, Bexar County, cause no. 2026CI24681, against the Texas Secretary of State, Robert S. Howden, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Director Freeman F. Martin. The claim is breach of the 2021 settlement in Stringer v. Hughs (W.D. Tex., “Stringer II”), which made online voter registration with driver-license transactions permanent.
• As pleaded (not as the tracker summarised it): DPS “failed to send almost 600,000 voter registrations to the SOS” for distribution to county registrars as of 2026-09-22 (date of Votebeat reporting the petition relies on), some stretching back to October 2025. The counties received the files from SOS in a surge in September 2026; the petition cites a Dallas Morning News tally of at least 593,000 sent to counties as of 2026-10-05. Harris and Dallas counties got about 75,000 and 68,000.
• The petition pleads two separate problems: (1) DPS’s vendor-caused failure to transmit online registration data (DPS’s own March 2026 email blames a vendor programming change; Sen. Bettencourt later blamed an IT upgrade by Deloitte, per the petition), and (2) delays inside the SOS’s TEAM election-management system overhaul, documented by county election officials. The 600,000 figure belongs to (1). It was not an SOS failure to forward records to counties after a TEAM change, as the lead said.
• Relief sought: permanent injunction, production of tracking records the settlement requires, and a compliance advisory one month after the injunction. The petition requests no TRO or temporary injunction, and no hearing date was found in the petition or in coverage through 2026-10-16.
• 2026-10-15/16 (press report dates): an SOS spokesperson told USA TODAY “We don’t know of any counties with pending applications” and that DPS transactions on or before Oct 5 count for the Nov 3 election even if processed later. DPS said it fixed the problem Sept 13 (per Democracy Docket’s summary; not read at DPS). The petition’s position is that the state’s assurances cannot be taken at face value. The state’s answer had not been reported.

Open: the Sept 13 DPS fix date and the Oct 5 cutoff come from press summaries, not a state document; the SOS’s actual position is unfiled. Docket not checked directly (Bexar County district clerk portal). Related: Votebeat reporting (Sept 22-23 and Oct 1, 2026) cited in the petition was not fetched.