Roughly 1.2 million Texans – including roughly 300,000 residents of Harris County — have been placed on voter suspense lists, following failed efforts by their respective counties to verify their current addresses by mail. They now face an October 5, 2026, deadline to confirm their addresses ahead of the midterm elections.
"It’s a great idea for all voters to check their voter registration information and ideally do it before the October 5 registration deadline. You can do that by going to votetexas.gov and using the My Voter Portal," said Alicia Pierce, spokesperson for the Office of the Texas Secretary of State. "From there, you can also find a link to update your registration address online."
Texas does not have online registration for brand new voter registration, but the site does allow people to update their addresses if they have moved.
"If you have any trouble with that, you can also contact your county registrar directly," Pierce said.
Voters who do not confirm their registrations with their correct addresses before the October 5 deadline will have to fill out additional paperwork on Election Day to cast their ballots.
"If for some reason you can’t update before the voter registration deadline of October 5 for…this upcoming November election, you can still show up at the polls and, when you check in to vote, and the poll worker pulls up your record, they’re going to see that you’re in suspense, and they’re going to ask you to complete a statement of residency to confirm your address is correct," said Annette Ramirez, Harris County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar.
Ramirez said there are three reasons people typically wind up on a voter suspense list. One is that when the registrar mailed out voter registration cards earlier this year, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) returned a voter's card as non-deliverable and unable to forward. A second is that the county district clerk sends the voter registrar a list of all jury summonses that have similarly come back as non-deliverable. A third is that the county has received a change of address notice for a resident from the USPS.
"When we do a mass mail out of 2.7 million voter registration cards, we anticipate receiving over 100,000 of those back," Ramirez said. "So, this isn’t unusual. This is what we normally see on this cadence at this time."
Alicia Pierce said that voter suspense lists are nothing new.
"The voter suspense list is actually a tool to protect voters," she said. "It was created in response to the 1995 Voter Registration Act and it’s a way to make sure that voters are still able to cast their ballot and [that] we maintain a clean updated voter registration roll."
While winding up on a county's voter suspense list doesn't immediately suspend or cancel a person's voter registration, it can have consequences if people wait too long to update their information.
"If voters don’t take action to correct an erroneous addition of the voter to the suspense list, then the voter will be purged in two years," said David Froomkin, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center. "The state imposes that legal obligation on the county registrar."
In response, the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector’s Office noted that a voter is only removed from a county’s voter rolls after not voting through two federal election cycles — or four years. Alicia Pierce also noted that anyone mistakenly removed from the rolls following two election cycles can be immediately reinstated and still vote.
Regardless, Froomkin said there are reasons to be concerned the voter suspense lists, and resulting voter purges, could be discriminatory.
"These kinds of programs that states have habitually adopted can be troubling in themselves," he said. "There’s a political science literature suggesting that these programs for purging the voter rolls operate with high degrees of error and with a disparate impact that affects Hispanic voters more than other voters."
Note: This story has been updated to include responses from the Office of the Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and the Office of the Texas Secretary of State.
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