In December 2020, Heidi Stirrup, the Trump White House liaison to the Justice Department, was barred from the agency’s headquarters for pressuring staffers to give up sensitive information to support claims — ultimately unfounded — of election fraud.
Roughly a month later, Ms. Stirrup was appointed to the Prince William County electoral board in Virginia. Since 2025, she has served as chair of the board, which oversees elections in a majority Democratic county that touches two congressional districts.
Ms. Stirrup, who did not respond to a request for comment, is one of at least 25 county-level election officials who have taken office across the country since the last major federal election in 2024 and — through public statements or actions — have aligned with the broader election-denier movement, according to a Times review of a new database from Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit voting-rights organization.
These officials — ranging from Virginia to Ohio to Nevada — have all come to office since President Trump returned to power and all currently play roles in elections in counties that are home to key House, Senate or statewide midterm races this year. All have either publicly espoused false conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election or that American elections are rife with fraud, or taken direct action to support those theories.
This surge in election-skeptic officials adds to the ranks of at least 69 who were already in office across different states, the database review, along with a New York Times analysis, shows. They include county election directors, members of election boards, and members of various county governing boards with the power to canvass and certify the vote. Most took office after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and his allies began to ramp up their election fraud rhetoric.
Among those officials, 41 have taken direct action to interfere with elections, such as trying to delay or deny certification, or have direct ties to activist election-denier groups. Roughly 60 people posted or shared messages on social media — some repeatedly and others just once — questioning the election results in 2020 or supporting other conspiracy theories.
Some examples: In Nevada, Jim Hindle, who was indicted on a charge of serving as a fake elector in 2020 in a case that is still pending, has been the clerk in Storey County since 2022. In Arizona, Kathleen Gomez, who said she would not have certified the 2024 election, took office in Cochise County in 2025.
These local officials could prove to be critical allies to the president as he seeks greater control over the electoral process in part, by his own admission, to stave off a rough midterm cycle for Republicans.
Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer for the National Association of Election Officials, said these officials’ roles risked lending legitimacy to false theories. At worst, they could try to interfere directly with results.
“What we’re seeing now is the sort of thing that people have long worried about,” Ms. Patrick said. Still, she added, such election interference is rare.
There are thousands of local election officials across the country, and an examination of every local election worker is a near-impossible task. The Times’s review offers a look at a slice of a wide universe of officials, but the number of those with ties to the election-denier movement is larger. And the election skeptics identified by The Times are still a fraction of the country’s local election officials.
While their authority varies state to state, many of these local officials have broad authority over election policies that directly affect voting, such as early voting locations. Others help maintain state voter lists, with the power to remove eligible voters from the rolls.
Election experts noted that the strength of the American electoral system is its decentralized nature, making a broad attack nearly impossible. But the growing number of activists serving in local election roles could create a significant disturbance, they said.
“Every state runs its own elections, under its own laws with its own local officials,” said Samantha Tarazi, the chief executive of Voting Rights Lab. “There’s no switch in the Oval Office that changes how an election turns out.”
The list of local officials aligned with the election-denial movement combines a compilation by the Voting Rights Lab and additional analysis by The Times. Here are some examples.
A Wholesale Change in Power in North Carolina
No state in the country experienced as much turnover in election oversight as North Carolina. Last year, each of the state’s 100 board of elections chairs flipped from Democratic to Republican.
The change was the result of a state law, passed by a Republican supermajority, that stripped the incoming Democratic governor of authority over the state election board and handed it to the auditor’s office, which was controlled by a Republican. The auditor was also empowered to replace the chair of every county board.
Attempts to change voting access happened quickly. Republicans sought to move early voting sites off college campuses and reduce Sunday voting, which officials in both parties called a blatant effort to make it harder for students and Black voters to cast ballots.
At least three new county chairs have connections to the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group of right-wing election activists who have at times espoused false conspiracy theories.
A founding member of the group, Jay DeLancy, is now an election board member in Lee County. Mr. DeLancy, a longtime election activist, founded his own group, Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, in 2011.
Following the 2024 election for a state supreme court justice, Mr. DeLancy filed a complaint with the Wake County board of elections, arguing that ineligible voters could have made the difference in the race’s outcome. He requested a new election. His effort failed.
This year, Mr. DeLancy has been at the center of efforts to restrict Sunday voting.
In an interview, he said he didn’t think poll workers should have to work that day. More broadly, he said, his aim was “for elections to be administered fairly.”
In Antrim County, Mich., a Deeply Rooted Conspiracy Theory
This Republican-heavy county in northern Michigan recorded only about 16,000 votes in 2020. But it remains a hotbed of election conspiracy theories.
On the night of the 2020 election, a small error caused the publication of incorrect results showing that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the heavily Republican county. The county’s clerk at the time, Sheryl Guy, who had just cast her own ballot for Mr. Trump, explained her mistake and quickly corrected the tally. But then a team of lawyers and computer experts working to help Mr. Trump challenge Mr. Biden’s win across the country descended on Antrim and produced a report claiming that the election there showcased errors in voting machines. The report was quickly debunked, but that didn’t stop it from gaining steam, garnering mentions in speeches from Mr. Trump and his allies and in lawsuit filings.
Eventually, the Antrim machine conspiracy theory was eclipsed by other falsehoods. But locally, the effects reverberated. In 2024, Ms. Guy lost her re-election race to Victoria Bishop, the wife of a far-right radio personality known as “Trucker Randy” Bishop. Ms. Bishop, with support from her husband, had campaigned on the pillars of the election-denial movement, including claims of vast problems with dead people on the voting rolls and the promise to train township clerks to hand-count ballots.
Since taking office, Ms. Bishop and her husband have continued to ignite false theories.
This year, she began removing voters from the rolls and flagging others to local clerks in her region, according to the secretary of state’s office. This came after she sent notices to voters she determined may have moved out of state or died. She said her analysis was based on change-of-address forms filed with the post office, along with a lack of voting in multiple elections. She relied in part for her analysis on a group run by election-denial activists, according to a statement by the group.
The Michigan secretary of state’s office, run by a Democrat, Jocelyn Benson, who is running for governor this year, explained to her that county clerks lack the authority to cancel voter registrations unilaterally and that list maintenance falls under the jurisdiction of clerks who work at the township and municipal level. In June, the state ordered her to take compliance training and cut off her access to voter records until she does. In addition, the Michigan State Police opened a criminal investigation in February after Mr. Bishop was spotted during a public meeting using Ms. Bishop’s work computer, according to a copy of a police report viewed by The Times.
Ms. Bishop’s office released a statement earlier this year framing her work as legal and necessary to ensure clean voter rolls. “This initiative is the fulfillment of a specific mandate to rectify long-standing vulnerabilities in the county’s registration data,” the statement said.
The Bishops have denied wrongdoing in the criminal inquiry and said that Mr. Bishop was waiting for his wife in her office and watching the board meeting at her work computer.
A New Majority in Mohave
Sonny Borrelli was one of the most vocal Republican state senators in Arizona to protest the 2020 election.
He signed a letter to then-Vice President Mike Pence asking that he not certify the election. At other times, he called for it to be nullified.
Forced to retire from the state senate in 2025 because of term limits, Mr. Borrelli was elected to the board of supervisors of Mohave County, a deeply red enclave along the western border. He joined two other board members: Ron Gould, who had expressed an interest in refusing to certify an election in 2022 but decided against it “under duress,” and Travis Lingenfelter, who delayed his vote to certify the 2022 election, explaining at the time that he was making a statement.
Mr. Gould has long pushed for Mohave County to hand-count its ballots, a common goal of conservative election activists that many election officials say would introduce more errors, cost significantly more than tabulation machines and take weeks if not months to complete. In the end, Mr. Lingenfelter joined the two other members to reject a hand-counting proposal before the 2024 election.
But Mr. Gould has continued his push. In recent comments, he suggested that Mr. Borrelli and Mr. Lingenfelter might be open to supporting his effort to make hand-counting a requirement before the 2026 election.
Mr. Borrelli did not respond to requests for comment.
Kirsten Noyes and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
The post A Growing Number of Election Deniers Hold Key Local Roles in Midterms appeared first on New York Times.
