Texas AG candidate vows to probe Deloitte voter registration delay role

Nathan Johnson, a Texas state senator and the Democratic candidate for attorney general, announced that, if elected, he plans to investigate Deloitte and other state vendor contracts in the wake of a software error that resulted in a failure to process voter registrations for what he and a Republican state lawmaker say were at least 178,000 Texans.

Johnson, in an exclusive interview with CNBC ahead of the Friday announcement, blamed Texas Republicans for attempting to shrink the state government and outsource essential duties to contractors.

Deloitte allegedly installed a software update on the Department of Public Safety’s servers in 2025 that led to the error, which was only caught in September with a little over a month to go before the 2026 midterm election. If he becomes attorney general, Johnson 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 whole story,” the Dallas County Democrat said.
“It’s just the leading edge that really ought to cause people to look hard at this larger phenomenon of outsourcing core state functions that really a major government like Texas ought to be able to handle.”

Johnson, who has been in the state Senate since 2019, will face off against Republican nominee 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 on 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 on Friday.

According to the Texas Legislative Budget Board, which keeps an online database of state contracts, Deloitte has six active contracts with DPS at a total value of $84.46 million. Across the state government, Deloitte has 30 active contracts with 16 state agencies totaling $2.02 billion in active value.

Johnson’s announcement, shared first with CNBC, comes a little more than a week after The Texas Tribune and VoteBeat reported that the DPS error caused at least 200,000 voter registration applications to go unprocessed. The Secretary of State’s office flagged the error when DPS transmitted the entire backlog of registrations in one batch, flooding county registrars in mid-September, ahead of the state’s Oct. 5 voter registration deadline.

Texans can use DPS’s online driver’s license portal to register to vote.

Republicans have also criticized the blunder. Texas state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from the Houston area, pointed to Deloitte and the Texas…