The Election Deniers Are Winning
· The Atlantic
Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity expert from Alabama, spent years as a bit player in the world of election denial. He wasn’t a star with his own media platform, like the MyPillow guy. But he still gained a modest following by circulating conspiracy theories about President Trump’s 2020 defeat, including that poll workers gave Trump supporters—but not other voters—felt-tip markers to fill out their ballots, rendering them invalid and unreadable by voting machines. More recently, he’s asserted that a group of federal lawmakers is covering up foreign election interference. “They’re all puppets,” he said on the Rumble-streamed Real AF Patriot show in January. “They’re bought and paid for; it’s just by who.” He claimed that because of “undeniable” evidence of malfeasance, justice was coming.
On that last point, Parikh may actually be in a position to know. He is now pushing debunked election claims from within the systems he rails against as a special government employee in the Trump administration. The search-warrant affidavit that allowed the FBI to seize election materials in Georgia in January—an extraordinary intervention by federal law enforcement—cited an analysis by Parikh. Last fall, Parikh began a contract with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office that made him a player in the state’s process for certifying election equipment. He boasts of access to the Wyoming secretary of state, who, he said on Rumble, has invited him to participate in an online presentation with residents. And at 1:01 a.m. on Christmas Day, Trump made Parikh internet famous when he reposted a video of the 63-year-old testifying in court that election equipment could be infiltrated remotely.
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Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. Another is the attorney Kurt Olsen, who was brought on last fall by Trump to investigate the 2020 election. Olsen’s work in the government—following years of pushing debunked or unsubstantiated theories—helped lead to the seizure of the Georgia ballots. In Arizona, federal probes of the 2020 election by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are under way. Olsen and other Trump administration officials have participated in extensive meetings about U.S. elections with senior members of the Justice Department in recent months, four people familiar with the meetings told us. In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson said, “The Justice Department is committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent.”
[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]
The president signed an executive order on March 31 that attempts to change the rules on mail-in voting, and his allies in Congress are endeavoring to reshape elections ahead of the midterms this fall, spending weeks debating a voter-ID bill that is almost certainly doomed. In April the Justice Department demanded that officials in Wayne County, Michigan, turn over ballots from the 2024 election. “There are some of us election deniers that are supporting the federal government, and things are changing,” Parikh—one of the people who helped Olsen unsuccessfully challenge voting systems in Arizona years ago—said on the Rumble show. Though he said the team he was working with was smaller than he’d like, he said it was filled with “quality people” who care about “fixing” elections.
Shortly before the Georgia affidavit became public, Parikh told us he wouldn’t get into the details of his work for the federal government. In a phone call, he said he would like voting equipment in all 50 states investigated but told us sternly and loudly that he could “neither confirm nor deny” the details of his government work. Yet in an interview with Talking Points Memo after the Georgia affidavit was unsealed, Parikh warned of a “cabal” that is compromising elections and compared himself to Ron Swanson from the sitcom Parks and Recreation, a character who despises the very government he serves. “Working for the government but hating them every bit. Right?” he told the news outlet. “That guy’s my hero.”
So many people are pressing debunked and unsubstantiated election theories from within the government that their presence has become a feature of the system. They range from those with immense power—including the president—all the way down to local officials. Others are investigating them. In Riverside County, California, Sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican who is running for governor, seized about 650,000 ballots and other election materials in March after local activists alleged malfeasance when California voters last year overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to redraw the state’s congressional map in favor of Democrats.
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Bianco told us that activists with a citizen group known as the Riverside Election Integrity Team had complained to his office that the number of ballots counted by election officials exceeded the number of votes cast. “There’s obviously something wrong with the machines,” he recalled activists claiming, citing their own research, “because we didn’t have that many ballots.” County elections officials explained that the activists were relying on imprecise data. But Bianco was determined to find out for himself. “The intent of the investigation is to count the ballots and see how many there are,” he told us in a video interview.
When we asked what steps his investigators took to assess the validity of the activists’ claims, the sheriff grew exasperated: “There’s no steps to determine the validity,” he said. “The validity is the records.” He brushed aside criticism from Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, who went to court to try to stop the probe. And Bianco dismissed alarm among election experts who said that his moves could deepen public mistrust in the democratic process. “An investigation increases their confidence,” the sheriff told us. Soon after, the California Supreme Court ordered the sheriff to pause his investigation and preserve the seized material while it reviews the case.
Undeterred, the Riverside Election Integrity Team is working with activists from at least half a dozen California counties to help them get records from county officials to review the outcome of last year’s redistricting referendum. Greg Langworthy, who calls himself the group’s “de facto leader,” told us his group intends to scrutinize similar records after the midterm elections—before results are certified, a process that can take weeks in California.
At the federal level, one main focus appears to be proving foreign interference—which election deniers have floated as a possible justification for Trump to declare a national emergency that could allow him to attempt to take control over some aspects of the election. But the proof has been elusive.
Staff from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in recent months have briefed representatives for U.S. attorneys’ offices about potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and communications networks. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has accused U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence personnel of participating in a “years-long coup” against Trump that began with the 2016 election. In January, she was present at the raid in Fulton County, a highly unusual move for an intelligence official whose purview is foreign threats, not domestic law enforcement.
Gabbard’s team has found that voting machines in Puerto Rico contained security weaknesses that could make them susceptible to manipulation, but found no evidence that the machines were actually tampered with or that any votes were altered, according to people familiar with the findings. Two people briefed on the activities said local officials in Puerto Rico have heard nothing more from ODNI since last year. Jason Wareham, the CEO of Mojave Research, the company that conducted the security review, documented his technical conclusions in a signed declaration to Gabbard, which we reviewed. It states that Olsen (who did not respond to multiple requests for comment) made assertions about stolen votes that were not backed up by sufficient forensic evidence. Wareham told us he was informed by an ODNI official that, after Mojave’s review was complete, Olsen wrote a letter to Trump in which he claimed that the company was taking money from the billionaire George Soros and acting at his direction. Wareham “emphatically” denies the allegation, he told us.
An ODNI official told us that Olsen wasn’t involved in the office’s examination of Puerto Rico voting systems, and that information he provided “was done so voluntarily” and “reviewed in the context of all of the other information available to ODNI.” The official added that the decision to examine the systems in Puerto Rico was made internally and “not directly connected to Mr. Olsen’s broader efforts.”
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The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us in a statement that “election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump, and the American people sent him back to the White House because they overwhelmingly supported his commonsense election integrity agenda. His entire Administration is working together closely on these issues,” she said. “The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”
Puerto Rico Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, who represents the island as a nonvoting member of Congress and caucuses with the Democrats, told us that in spite of the lack of evidence of infiltration, he worries that the Trump administration could “use Puerto Rico to build a conspiracy theory and a narrative to subvert elections in the broader United States.”
Many of the election deniers who now have power are familiar to anyone who was paying attention in the aftermath of the 2020 vote. Heather Honey, who as a Pennsylvania-based election activist sought to reverse Trump’s defeat and worked on numerous efforts to challenge elections in Arizona, now holds a key role at the Department of Homeland Security. There, she interacts with state election officials, many of whom don’t trust her, half a dozen of them told us. During a call with election officials last fall, Honey downplayed the impact of millions of dollars in funding cuts to cybersecurity initiatives (including one dedicated to elections) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with securing the nation’s election systems, two officials told us. Honey told state and local officials that CISA had “strayed from its mission” and engaged in censorship, echoing claims by Trump supporters that CISA’s programs contributed to suppressing their views online. One of the officials, who works in cybersecurity, was stunned by her remark; his office’s previous work with CISA and federal law enforcement involved reporting death threats against elections officials and cyber risks. Those reports, he said, were driven by fears of violence and abuse, not political rhetoric. (Honey and CISA did not return calls for comment.)
The idea of finding foreign election interference in a past election and using it to declare a national emergency has been pushed by the attorney Peter Ticktin, a friend of Trump’s who helped promote a hypothetical executive order based on the theory. Ticktin—who also assisted in securing pardons for some January 6 rioters—admits he has no evidence that votes were flipped in 2020. But in an interview, he claimed that some machines used in that election had “chips” connected to a server farm in Serbia that could control electoral outcomes—and that Serbia is a “satellite of China.”
Ticktin is also trying to persuade Colorado Governor Jared Polis to grant clemency to Tina Peters, a former county clerk who was convicted of state charges tied to tampering with voting equipment. Last month, a Colorado appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction but ordered reconsideration of her nearly nine-year sentence. A January 21 clemency application that we obtained through an open-records request shows that Peters acknowledges having “made mistakes.” If granted clemency, Peters pledged that she would stay on the right side of the law. Her X account has since continued to feature dubious claims, including that Democrats oppose banning electronic equipment, because “They cheat.”
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Mike Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” has railed for years against supposed election fraud, alleging various disproved theories, including that software was tampered with to delete votes for Trump. He has used his clout in the election-denial community to create his own news network, LindellTV, with credentialed reporters at the White House and Pentagon. He also gets personal access to figures at the highest level of government. Lindell told us he has given federal investigators reams of “evidence” of wrongdoing in the 2020 election.
In July 2025, Lindell spoke online about his meetings with Trump. “I did just meet with the president—now this is the third time—about two weeks ago, and I’ll be hopefully seeing him again next week,” he said during an appearance on the Stern American video show. One focus for the administration, he said, is its work on the 2020 vote. But he explained that “a team going forward” is working “to get rid of these machines and computers” and to require people to vote by paper ballots that are hand counted. Lindell told us recently that he talks regularly with Olsen. Although the pillow salesman complained about what he considered the slow pace of federal investigations, he told us it’s a “blessing” that people like Parikh and Olsen are in positions of real influence to address attempts to rig voting machines. “The big thing is, you can take whole countries without firing a shot,” he said.
Election deniers ultimately want an overhaul of how U.S. states and localities record and count votes. Olsen tried to ban electronic voting equipment in Arizona in 2022—and lost. He represented Kari Lake, who was then running for governor, and Mark Finchem, who was running for secretary of state. They alleged that the nation’s transition to electronic systems and computer voting technology decades ago created risks of hacking and fraud, and argued that the devices violated the rights of Arizonans because the voting systems were vulnerable to cyberattacks.
The candidates and their attorneys asked a federal judge to scrap vote-tabulation machines and order votes to be counted by hand at the precinct level. (A top county election official testified that a hand count would require the hiring of 25,000 temporary workers and a building the size of an NFL stadium.) The judge threw out the case, finding that the plaintiffs cited only hypothetical allegations about the voting equipment. Olsen and another attorney were slapped with $122,200 in legal sanctions.
At the time, the lawsuit was bizarre to Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the governing board that has helped run elections in Maricopa County. Now he told us he thinks the case offers a preview of how Trump, aided by some of the same players, may be seeking to undermine the coming elections. “I was one of those that would real quickly just roll my eyes and think these people are just crazy,” Gallardo told us. These days, he takes them seriously. “They are hell-bent on making sure that elections are run under their purview—the way they want elections to be held.”
Finchem, now a state senator, is still trying to influence elections. He said during an online appearance in March that an election nonprofit he helps lead has been “feeding research” to federal authorities. “The dam is breaking,” he said in a recent fundraising appeal. Two weeks ago he posted a picture on X that appeared to be made with AI of a man bearing a resemblance to Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes walking near a county jail in handcuffs. (Fontes’s attorney sent a legal demand last week to Finchem asking him to retract the “defamatory content,” the letter, which we reviewed, said.)
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Joanna Lydgate, the CEO and president of the nonpartisan States United Democracy Center, told us that she believes the ultimate goals of election deniers are to subvert America’s system of choosing its representatives and to make it easier to discard results that Trump and his allies don’t like. “I think it’s that simple; I really do,” she said. “Whether it’s an executive order or death by 5,000 cuts, it’s chipping away at our election system. They need to sow doubt; they need to undermine public trust; and each one of these narratives is a tactic to that end.”
In many ways, MAGA has already won its war against American elections. Confidence that a person’s state or local government will run a free and fair election is slipping. Trump’s administration is filled with election skeptics; federal investigations into 2020 are under way; and conspiracy theorists who were once marginalized now run some local election offices. Several officials who have been integral to running fair and transparent elections in past cycles told us they are already burned out—just as the deniers are getting started.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting.