Voters elect more than 7,000 state legislators across the United States. In a system like ours, where elections are run by individual states, that means legislators have immense power to determine voting procedures and shape how elections are administered. When they serve in state legislatures, election deniers can leverage this power to erode our democracy — and do so outside the spotlight of national politics.
We have created a resource identifying the election deniers serving as legislators in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — using data collected by States United Action and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy. These seven states were the focal points of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As a result, they also became centers of the election denier movement, and hotbeds of election lies and misinformation.
In total, we found that 201 sitting legislators in these seven states are election deniers.
Understanding the threat
In some legislatures, election deniers are a substantial political force: They make up a third of the Arizona Legislature and nearly half of the Pennsylvania Senate. In other states, election deniers represent a much smaller share of the legislature. But even in small numbers, election deniers can have outsized impact. Some serve in leadership positions. Others sit on committees that can introduce, shape, suppress, or kill election-related bills.
Regardless of the positions they hold in their respective legislatures, election deniers in recent years have introduced or cosponsored numerous bills that would add barriers to voting, enable investigations of voters, promote election conspiracy theories, make it harder for nonpartisan election officials to do their jobs, or otherwise interfere with the routine functioning of elections.
In Arizona in 2023, an election denier sponsored a bill that would have allowed for full hand counts of ballots, which subject election results to human error and fatigue. Another offered a bill that would make ballot images and voters’ personal information public. In Pennsylvania, election deniers sponsored and cosponsored a bill requiring the state to create a hotline for election fraud, which is practically nonexistent. In Wisconsin, seven election deniers cosponsored a constitutional amendment to restrict funding for election offices by banning donations. These are just a few examples of many.
And even when bills like these fail, they erode public confidence in elections and allow election disinformation to spread.
Some election deniers have taken their efforts even further. After the 2020 election, state legislators were among those who supported President Donald Trump’s attempt to overrule the decision of the voters and remain in power. And three election deniers who are now state legislators joined the effort outright by serving as fake electors — signing their names to official-looking documents falsely claiming that Trump was the rightful winner in their states.
This combined record shows that election deniers in state legislatures are a threat to current and future elections, either by their actions as legislators, by promoting disinformation and conspiracy theories, or by their demonstrated failure to respect legitimate election results.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.