Texas Republican behind bid to block certification has long pushed election denial myths

The Republican official asking a federal judge to block certification of Texas’ upcoming election results once claimed without evidence that more people voted than were registered in 17 counties in 2020 and said no elected official could prove they actually won their election.

Daniel Rogers, chairman of the Potter County Republican Party, joined his county party this week in suing to prevent certification of Texas’ Nov. 3 election results unless officials first hand-count every paper ballot in the state.

Long before filing the lawsuit, Rogers laid out a sweeping distrust of American elections, repeatedly suggesting electronic voting systems make it impossible to know whether election results are legitimate and demanding a return to paper ballots

In a June 2025 interview, Rogers invoked a familiar election denial claim about the 2020 election.

“We can’t figure out why we had 17 counties that had more people vote in 2020 than they have registered voters,” Rogers said. “Well, that can’t happen with a paper system. So why not go to a system that the voters want, and it’s simple, that’s inexpensive, and it’s easy to implement. And a high school senior could run Potter County’s election.”

Rogers did not identify the 17 counties or provide evidence for the claim.

Max Flugrath, communications director for the pro-voting group Fair Fight Action, highlighted Rogers’ comments Wednesday, noting that the “more votes than voters” allegation echoes false claims spread after the 2020 election by Heather Honey, a prominent election denier who now holds a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security.

Honey helped originate the false claim that Pennsylvania had roughly 205,000 more votes than voters in the 2020 election. The assertion relied on incomplete voter data and was later repeated by President Donald Trump as he sought to overturn his loss.

Pennsylvania’s Department of State says official records show 6,945,045 registered voters cast ballots in the election — but only  6,915,283 cast votes for president. The others left that field blank.

Honey has since risen inside the federal government. She currently serves as a senior counselor to the Department of Homeland Security secretary and as a senior adviser to the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Rogers’ election denial comments went well beyond the 17-county allegation, claiming electronic voting machines made it impossible to verify election results.

“And we don’t have any way of knowing who really won,” Rogers said in that 2025 interview. “No elected official in office today can prove they won the election. And that, to me, is a very bad system.”

He repeatedly blamed electronic voting equipment for his distrust of elected officials and argued for a return to hand-marked paper ballots.

“The frustration with people is that they feel like the people they elect are not listening to them, and they don’t,” Rogers said. “But the problem goes back to what I was saying earlier. I believe it comes down to the machines.”

Later in the interview, Rogers explicitly described the election system as rigged.

“So I blame the people that don’t vote,” Rogers said. “But I understand why they don’t, because they think the system’s rigged. So let’s unrig the system, get our republic back, and start showing up, and problem solved.”

He ended the interview by suggesting, again without evidence, that unnamed actors possessed the ability to rig the 2024 presidential election but had not done so.

“I just think we need to thank God that they didn’t rig this election,” Rogers said. “And that we have Trump in charge instead of Kamala Harris.”

Throughout the interview, Rogers also expressed an unusually hostile view of the word “democracy” itself.

He rejected the description of the United States as a democracy, telling the interviewer that democracy amounted to “mob rule.”

“That’s why you’ll never hear the word democracy from me, because we do not live in a democracy that is an instant dictatorship,” Rogers said. “That’s mob rule. We live in a representative republic.”

Those statements offer new context for the lawsuit Rogers and the Potter County Republican Party filed this week.

The complaint asks U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to stop Texas election officials from certifying federal election results until every paper ballot in every precinct has been manually counted. Yet the lawsuit identifies no Texas voting machine that has altered votes and explicitly concedes that the plaintiffs do not allege any previous Potter County election was altered or inaccurately reported.