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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 pretending to shrink the state government and outsourcing 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 Secretary of State in a post to X on Monday. "In typical unintended IT upgrade consequences, the DPS vendor Deloitte updated the voter registration system, and those automatic transfers stopped coming thru, and before you ask, YES, the Texas Secretary of State personnel should have also caught the lack of Voter Registrations, but they didn't!" Bettencourt wrote. Alicia Pierce, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State said the office "is providing grant funding to help offset the cost of additional personnel as counties process these delayed registrations." Pierce said the 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 has come to rely on more as Republicans have worked to shrink the government. In 2023, Deloitte has been asked to administer the Texas Energy Fund, a taxpayer-funded state program to build electric power infrastructure. But the consultant's contracts came under fire a year later after it 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 backlog broke in the lead-up to Texas' midterm elections, which feature some of the most critical races in the country. Democrats are hoping to win statewide in Texas for the first time since 1994, and have launched spirited campaigns for both governor and Senate. State Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate, has led Paxton in most recent polls. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter rates the race a "toss up." It also comes amid growing fears that President Donald Trump could question the results of this year's elections or try to suppress votes by deploying the National Guard or border agents to polling places. Johnson said he believed the voter registration gaffe was a "genuine error, but not an excusable error." "There's a lot of talk about election integrity," Johnson said. "But I can't think of a thing that shakes voters' confidence much more than learning that almost 200,000 people applied to vote and didn't have their registrations processed."
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