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.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a“ Steel Across America” event ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11th attacks on the Ellipse near the White House on Sept. 8, 2026 in Washington, D.C. President Trump welcomed 9/ 11 first responders to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation’ s“ Steel Across America” event featuring a 16,900- pound, 21- foot steel beam recovered.
For Trump, even 9/11 is an opportunity
There was a reason organizers of the 9/11 ceremony in Manhattan told President Trump he could not speak at this year’s memorial service.
A good one, it turns out.
Because in a speech he gave on Tuesday in Washington, he did exactly what they were presumably worried about — he made it about himself.
According to The New York Times, Trump had wanted a speaking role at the service, but the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, which oversees the site, said no, as they’ve maintained for the past decade-plus that the venue and event should be nonpartisan.
Trump has long used awful tragedies to either puff himself up, trash political opponents, or sell lies to the American people.
He blamed a deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport last year on diversity, equity and inclusion policies. He blamed Puerto Ricans for the devastation they endured after Hurricane Maria in 2017. He reportedly considered withholding disaster relief after the California wildfires based on the way affected regions voted. In an interview on Fox News meant to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, he used the occasion to slam former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi…with graves of the dead behind him.
And now, as we approach the 25th anniversary of what many New Yorkers consider the darkest day in modern history, Trump has done it again.
He told a rambling, nonsensical story — one he’s told before — about going to Ground Zero just after terrorists flew two commercial jets into the twin towers. In the story, which no one has been able to verify, despite multiple attempts, he says firefighters had to carry him out of One Liberty Plaza, also known as the U.S. Steel Building, because they thought it was about to collapse.
As CNN fact checker Daniel Dale notes, there’s no evidence Trump went into this building, especially at a time when NYPD and NYFD had locked down the area. There’s no evidence that building was collapsing — in fact, it was deemed structurally sound and reopened within two months of the attacks. There’s no evidence he was carried out of it by firefighters.
But the lie isn’t even the worst part. Pretend it was all true — why would the leader of our country, and a New Yorker, decide to make that tragic day about himself?
Because that’s who Donald Trump is. He’s a malignant narcissist.
He’s also, incidentally, a terrible and ineffectual president, who’s made ill-fated decisions that he has to keep defending, and there’s nothing he won’t do to make himself look and feel better.
Within the first two minutes of his speech, he was cravenly using 9/11 to justify and promote his dumb war in Iran — two events separated by 25 years and 6,000 miles.
“And I will tell you, we’re right now fighting because we have a certain nation that wanted a nuclear weapon, they were very close to getting it, and now they have no chance at getting it. They will never have a nuclear weapon. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And they’ve been punished greatly. As you know, we’ve really taken it to them.”
As a New Yorker who lived through 9/11, still one of the worst days of my life, I’m utterly sickened by Trump’s crass, political, and self-promotional framing of that awful day.
And I’m relieved he won’t be given a platform to do it again on Friday’s anniversary in lower Manhattan.
Because for Trump, everything is his for the taking, and absolutely nothing is sacred.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.