Texas state senator and Democratic candidate for attorney general, Nathan Johnson, announced on Friday that if elected, he plans to investigate Deloitte (Deloitte) as well as other state government contractors. Previously, a software error resulted in the failure to process the voter registrations of at least 178,000 Texans, a figure cited by him and a Republican state senator.
Johnson stated in an exclusive interview with CNBC before his announcement on Friday that he believes the responsibility lies with the Texas Republicans for attempting to reduce the size of the state government and outsourcing its basic functions to contractors.
It is alleged that Deloitte installed a software update on the servers of Texas Department of Public Safety ( Department of Public Safety ) in 2025, which subsequently led to this error. It was not until September, with just over a month left until the mid-term elections in 2026, that the issue was discovered. If he becomes the Attorney General, Johnson stated that he hopes to review the process of outsourcing state government functions, as well as the specific contracts themselves.
"I believe that the issue of voter registration is definitely not the whole picture," said this Democrat from Dallas County.
"This is just a part of the forefront; what really should prompt people to seriously consider a broader phenomenon is the outsourcing of core state government functions, when large governments like Texas should be able to handle these affairs on their own."
Johnson has been serving in the state senate since 2019, and he will compete against the Republican nominee Mayes Middleton for the position to succeed the Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. A poll conducted by Texas Political Project (Texas Politics Project) in August showed that Middleton led Johnson by 5 percentage points. The margin of error for this poll is plus or minus 2.83 percentage points.
Deloitte did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday.
According to the online database of state contracts maintained by the Texas Legislative Budget Committee ( Texas Legislative Budget Board ), Deloitte has 6 active contracts with the Texas Department of Public Safety, with a total value of 84.46 million dollars. Looking at the entire state government, Deloitte has a total of 30 active contracts with 16 state agencies, totaling a value of 2.02 billion dollars.
The announcement of Johnson was first obtained by CNBC, more than a week after the news was reported by The Texas Forum News ( The Texas Tribune ) and VoteBeat. Both media outlets stated that an error by the Texas Department of Public Safety led to at least 200,000 voter registration applications not being processed. The Secretary of State's office discovered this error after the Department of Public Safety transmitted the backlog of registration applications all at once in mid-September, a practice that overwhelmed the county registrars, before the state's voter registration deadline on October 5th.
Residents of Texas can use the Public Safety Department's online driver's license portal to register as voters.
Republicans also criticized this mistake. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican state senator from the Houston area, mentioned Deloitte and the Texas Secretary of State's office on X on Monday.
"According to the typical consequences of an unintentional IT upgrade, DPS vendor Deloitte updated the voter registration system, and as a result, those automatic transfers stopped. Don't ask me how, but yes, the staff at the Texas Secretary of State's office should have noticed the missing voter registrations, yet they didn't!" Bettencourt wrote.
A spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State's office, Alicia Pierce, stated that the office "is providing funding to help offset the additional costs incurred by counties in handling these delayed registrations." Pierce mentioned that these registrations were sent to the counties in a timely manner before the elections on November 3rd.
Johnson indicates that the issue of voter registration is not the first mistake made by state governments after relying on external suppliers; he believes that as the Republican Party strives to reduce government spending, the state governments' dependence on outsourcing is also increasing.
In 2023, Deloitte was tasked with managing the Texas Energy Fund ( Texas Energy Fund ), a state project funded by taxpayers and used for building power infrastructure. However, a year later, the contract with this consulting firm came under scrutiny as it listed one company whose CEO had been convicted of a "misappropriation of funds" plan as one of the final candidates for Texas Energy Fund loan projects.
As news of backlogged voter registration emerges, Texas' mid-term elections are approaching, and several of the state's races are among the most crucial in the entire nation.
Democrats hope to win a statewide election in Texas for the first time since 1994 and have launched aggressive campaigns for governor and Senate seats. State Representative and Democratic Senate candidate James Talar leads Paxton in several recent polls. Cook Political Report, with, and Amy Walter describe this campaign as "tied."
This incident also occurs at a time when concerns are growing outside about President Donald Trump's possible questioning of this year's election results, or attempts to suppress voting by deploying National Guard or border personnel to polling stations.
Johnson indicates that he believes this voter registration error is 'a real mistake, but not a mistake that can be forgiven.'
"There's been a lot of discussion about election integrity," said Johnson. "But I can't think of anything that could shake voters' confidence more than learning that nearly 200,000 people applied to vote but were not registered."
