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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.