Texas State Senator Nathan Johnson speaks during a news conference after a group of Senate Democrats left the Senate as a redistricting bill was placed on the agenda at the Texas Capitol in Austin, August 12, 2025.
Mikala Compton | Austin American Statesman | Hearst Newspapers | Getty Images
Nathan Johnson, a Texas state senator and Democratic candidate for attorney general, announced that, if elected, he plans to investigate the contracts of Deloitte and other state vendors following a software error that caused voter registrations to fail to be processed for what he and a Republican state lawmaker say were at least 178,000 Texans.
Johnson, in an exclusive interview with CNBC ahead of Friday’s announcement, accused Texas Republicans of claiming to shrink state government and outsourcing essential tasks to contractors.
Deloitte reportedly installed a software update on the Department of Public Safety’s servers in 2025, leading to the error, which was not detected until September, just over a month before the 2026 midterm elections. If he becomes attorney general, Johnson has said he wants to review the process for outsourcing state functions, as well as the individual contracts themselves.
“I think the voter registration issue is absolutely not the only story,” the Dallas County Democrat said.
“It’s just the cutting edge that should really get people to take a closer look at this larger phenomenon of outsourcing of critical state functions that a government as big as Texas should be able to handle.”
Johnson, who has served in the state Senate since 2019, will face Republican candidate Mayes Middleton — who is also a state senator — in a bid to replace GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton. An August poll from the Texas Politics Project showed Middleton up 5 percentage points over Johnson. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.83 percentage points.
Deloitte did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
According to the Texas Legislative Budget Board, which maintains an online database of contracts with the state, Deloitte has six active contracts with DPS worth a total of $84.46 million. Within state government, Deloitte has 30 active contracts with 16 state agencies totaling $2.02 billion in active value.
Johnson’s announcement, first shared with CNBC, comes a little more than a week after the Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported that the DPS error resulted in at least 200,000 voter registration applications not being processed. The secretary of state’s office flagged the error when DPS transmitted the entire backlog of registrations in one batch, flooding county records in mid-September, ahead of the state’s Oct. 5 voter registration deadline.
Texans can use the DPS online driver’s license portal to register to vote.
Republicans also criticized the mistake. Texas State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston-area Republican, pointed the finger at Deloitte and the Texas Secretary of State in a message to X on Monday.
“In a typical, unintended consequence of an IT upgrade, DPS vendor Deloitte updated the voter registration system, and these automatic transfers stopped arriving, and before you ask, YES, the Texas Secretary of State staff should have also detected the lack of voter registration, but they didn’t!” Bettencourt wrote.
Alicia Pierce, a spokeswoman for the Texas Secretary of State, said the office “is providing grants to help offset the cost of additional staff as counties process these delayed registrations.” Pierce said registrations were sent to counties in time for the Nov. 3 election.
The voter registration issue is not the first botched job by an outside vendor, which Johnson said the state is relying on more as Republicans work to shrink government.
In 2023, Deloitte was tasked with administering the Texas Energy Fund, a taxpayer-funded state program to build electricity infrastructure. But the consultant’s contracts came under fire a year later after he chose a company whose CEO had been convicted of an “embezzlement scheme” as a finalist for a Texas Energy Fund loan program.
News of the voter registration delay broke as Texas’ midterm elections approach, which feature some of the nation’s most critical races.
Democrats hope to win the entire state of Texas for the first time since 1994 and have launched heated campaigns for governor and senator. State Rep. James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for Senate, has led Paxton in the most recent polls. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter calls the race a “toss-up.”
It also comes amid growing fears that President Donald Trump could call into question the results of this year’s election or attempt to suppress votes by deploying the National Guard or border agents to polling places.
Johnson said he thought the voter registration gaffe was a “real mistake, but not an excusable mistake.”
“There’s a lot of talk about election integrity,” Johnson said. “But I can think of nothing that could shake voter confidence more than learning that nearly 200,000 people applied to vote and their registration was not processed.”
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