Matt Cohen, Senior Reporter

Ever since several key races in Texas’ primary and special elections earlier this year did not go the way many GOPers hoped for, prominent election deniers have been cooking up new conspiracies to explain the results. And it’s the same playbook as the one they used to push disinformation and false claims about the 2020 election: voting machines suspiciously switching votes, “ghost voting IDs,” and a long-running conspiracy involving Venezuela.

• Among the more prominent voices is the far-right attorney Peter Ticktin, who claimed during a recent right-wing podcast appearance that voting machines controlled by Venezuela switched votes in Texas’ primary elections. “This is how they have control of the outcome of the elections,” he said. “These voting machines are in play now in Texas.”
  
  
• Harry Haury, the far-right leader of the anti-voting group Unite4Freedom, recently appeared on a different conservative podcast, where he also claimed there was voter fraud in Texas’ primary elections. “The enemy is INSIDE the gates of our election system, manipulating all of us,” Unite4Freedom posted about Texas’ elections on social media. “The Texas 2026 primary elections show clear evidence of intolerable manipulation for BOTH the Democrat and Republican primaries.”
  
  
• On the same podcast, John Eastman, a former Trump lawyer who was a key figure in the president’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election, made similar claims about Texas’ elections. Eastman, who was recently permanently disbarred by the California Supreme Court, claimed that January’s special election for a Texas Senate seat featured “ghost voting IDs based on actual voter IDs.”
  
  
• Then there’s Wayne Willott, a popular QAnon figure who goes by the online pseudonym Juan O. Savin — and who some conspiracy theorists think is actually the late John F. Kennedy Jr (don’t ask). Willott recently said during an online stream that there was “massive fraud” in the Texas primaries.

Speaking of Ticktin: He wants to be the next attorney general! His qualifications? He’s a conservative lawyer who represents election denier Tina Peters, and grew up with Trump. He’s also an accomplished poet, and holds some truly bonkers conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, which he’s using to justify his push to get the president to take control of voting.

• “I have thrown my hat in the ring to become the next AG, as I don’t know who else could do the job,” Ticktin wrote in a post published by the far-right outlet The Gateway Pundit. “There are many others who know how to run big companies or agencies, but they don’t realize that we are at war and need to fix the whole department.”
  
  
• Whoever Trump selects to lead the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will be bad, but Ticktin would be a particularly awful pick for elections and voting rights. He wants to reopen investigations into the 2020 election, target political opponents and pursue sweeping claims of election fraud that have been repeatedly debunked.
  
  
• “We have sufficient information and evidence at this point to prosecute numerous individuals,” Ticktin wrote — before escalating even further. “We have evidence of phone chips in the tabulators and of the massive plan to rig our elections and to take over our country.” In other words, Ticktin isn’t just interested in relitigating the 2020 election — he’s proposing to build it into the mission of DOJ itself. Yikes!