A Republican state representative who has claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump was appointed last week to oversee Texas election integrity, a move that could have serious implications for Harris County. 

Nate Schatzline, who has no previous election administration experience, resigned July 2 from his state representative post to accept a job from Gov. Greg Abbott as a senior adviser in charge of developing policy and legislative strategy related to election integrity. 

It appears the governor — who has disparaged Harris County elections and threatened a state takeover as recently as January — could be working behind the scenes to ensure that his party has some control over local polling places during November’s critical midterms. 

Abbott is seeking an unprecedented fourth term and will face Democratic nominee Gina Hinojosa in November. The governor has acknowledged the importance of Harris County ballots on statewide races and pledged to spend most of the $90 million in his war chest to turn the county “dark red.” 

Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said the criticism of Schatzline is that he’s too conservative and he has no background in elections. That shouldn’t matter if he stays in an advisory role created for him with no clear job description, Jones said, but it will likely become a problem for Texas Democrats if Abbott’s plan is to move Schatzline into the soon-to-be-vacant secretary of state role. 

“A takeover [of Harris County elections] seems very unlikely,” Jones said. “The fear that many blue counties would have is that Schatzline is something of a pit bull. If he were in the position of secretary of state, he might push the envelope on what the secretary of state is allowed to do in the electoral process and be hyper-focused on blue counties, forcing blue counties to be on their toes and potentially having to spend a lot of time and effort justifying decisions and providing information.” 

“The person at the top, as long as they let the staff do what they know how to do, there shouldn’t be any ripples or problems for elections across the state,” Jones added. “Where it gets complicated is if Schatzline decided to be hyper-aggressive. Over the past couple of sessions, the authority of the secretary of state to monitor, oversee and intervene in the electoral process at the county level has been strengthened.”

Other than occupying “a new position that was just created,” no one knows yet what exactly Schatzline is going to do and whether the advisory role is a stepping stone to secretary of state, Jones added. 

Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced early last month that she’d be stepping down from her post on July 17.  Nelson, a longtime Republican state senator, was appointed by Abbott in 2023 to oversee elections. Although Schatzline wasn’t appointed to secretary of state, it’s been suggested that he’s next in line, prompting one political insider to suggest that Nelson is reconsidering her resignation. 

Harvey Kronberg, owner and publisher of the nonpartisan news service Quorum Report, said in a July 1 newsletter that Nelson had become “uncomfortable” with the idea of Schatzline replacing her and that she’s reconsidering her resignation. Neither Nelson nor Abbott has confirmed that she’s staying in office. Jones said he’s heard the rumors and isn’t sure whether they’re credible.

Nelson was confirmed by the Texas Senate in 2023, so Abbott can’t remove her before she resigns. If she chooses not to leave, she can remain in office until she resigns again or another legal change occurs. Sen. Molly Cook, D-Houston, said in a social media video on June 4 that “it appears the governor of Texas has fired the secretary of state with the intention of putting someone in that role without having to go through the Senate confirmation process.”

Jones said that if Schatzline is appointed this month as secretary of state, he will stay on through the November midterms and the 2027 legislative session that ends in May but it’s highly unlikely he would be confirmed by the Texas Senate to continue serving in that capacity. 

“There is no way Schatzline gets Democratic support to stay secretary of state,” Jones said. “[Uber-conservative State Rep.] Briscoe Cain would have a better chance at [being] secretary of state.” 

Schatzline is a pastor at the Fort Worth megachurch Mercy Culture. He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2022 and was re-elected in 2024, during which time no bill bearing his name as the primary sponsor ever made it to Abbott’s desk. He became the senior director of the National Faith Advisory Board in late 2025 during Trump’s second term. 

Schatzline posted on social media last week that he’s grateful for the appointment and looks forward to “helping [Abbott] carry out his agenda of making Texas the blueprint for election integrity.”

Abbott called him a “dedicated conservative leader with a proven record in the fight for election integrity” and said Schatzline’s experience in the Texas House and in the Trump administration would be a “tremendous asset as we protect the voices of Texas voters.”

Kathleen Thompson, executive director of the Dallas-based media company Progress Texas, called Schatzline’s appointment “a giant middle finger to Texas voters.” 

“He’s terrible,” Thompson said. “He’s a conspiracy theorist and a liar. His church has been bragging about its low vaccination rate and when the measles outbreak started in Texas and spread like wildfire, it was tied to anti-intellectualism and skepticism of public health that has worked and saved lives for decades. He’s a mess.” 

Abbott hasn’t indicated how he plans to fill Nelson’s post and gave little information on Schatzline’s advisory role when he made the announcement last Thursday. However, the governor has said that Harris County is terrible at running elections, using that as his reasoning for an eight-month delay in calling an election to replace the late U.S. Congressman Sylvester Turner last year. The move kept residents in Congressional District 18, a historically blue seat, without representation for almost a year until Christian Menefee won a runoff in January for Turner’s unexpired term. Menefee now has to run again in November for the full term.

Scrutiny around Harris County elections began in earnest in 2020, when the county hired its first elections administrator, taking the responsibility of running elections away from the county clerk. In 2022, several precincts ran out of paper, and voters cited long lines and chaos at the polls. The elections administrator lasted less than two years on the job. 

Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, proposed a state law in 2022 that dismantled the elections administrator’s office and moved elections back to the county clerk. State inspectors were assigned to monitor the handling and counting of ballots in Harris County in 2024.

Critics said at the time that Bettencourt’s oversight legislation was an attempt by Republicans to exert more control over elections in a blue county in a traditionally red state. 

Teneshia Hudspeth was elected county clerk in 2020 and won re-election in 2022. She supervised more than a dozen elections without incident since accusations of election rigging and voter fraud — later found to be meritless — were made in 2022, after elections were returned to her office. Hudspeth, a Democrat, is also on the ballot in November. 

In January 2026, Abbott called Harris County “a repeat violator of election integrity” and said it should be stripped of operating elections and that state officials should take over. The comments were in reference to allegations made by Bettencourt that about 100 people were registered to vote by using a post office box rather than a home address, and many more are suspected of doing so. A law that passed in 2022 prohibits the use of P.O. boxes on voter registration cards but some exceptions exist.

Government watchdogs immediately called out Abbott’s remarks as political theater and noted that voter registration matters are supervised by Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Annette Ramirez, not Hudspeth’s office, which oversees elections.

“Those are two different office-holders with two different jobs,” University of Houston political science lecturer Nancy Sims said at the time. “Since Teneshia Hudspeth took over, there haven’t been any problems with elections.” 

Nelson’s office came under fire last year for using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database to verify the citizenship status of registered voters. 

A review identified 2,724 potential noncitizens on the voter roll, but county election officials later determined that some of the flagged voters were actually citizens and had registered through the DPS, where they were required to show proof of citizenship. 

Voting rights groups sued the state, claiming the SAVE database is inaccurate and could lead to the disenfranchisement of eligible voters, further noting that the state should have checked DPS records before sending a list of potential noncitizens to county election officials for investigation. The lawsuit is pending in federal court. 

Another lawsuit filed by the Texas Republican Party last year aims to close Texas primaries, meaning only voters registered with a specific political party can vote in that party’s primary. Schatzline supports closing primaries; Nelson, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, opposes it. Some conservatives say Democrats were using the open primary system to boost moderate candidates. That lawsuit is also pending in federal court. 

Jones said Monday that Nelson’s opposition to closing party primaries appears to be related to the complicated logistics of requiring every Texas voter to re-register with a party. “It gets really tricky in denying people the ability to participate in primaries,” Jones said. “One of the proposals some Republicans have made is that you register when you’re voting in the primary, but that would require changing other laws. Any of the options that the Republicans have proposed have huge logistical hurdles.”

Requiring 18 million voters to resubmit their registration would take years, Jones added. 

It’s also troublesome for some Democrats to have a person overseeing elections who thinks the polls were rigged against Trump six years ago. The Dallas Morning News reported last week that Schatzline has twice repeated “the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen,” including at a November rally in Abilene to honor the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk and on a podcast last August. 

“It’s not even debatable the amount of election fraud we had through mail-in ballots,” Schatzline said on the podcast with conservative influencer Jon Herold. “It’s not even debatable that the machines were screwed up and that we’ve seen unbelievable amounts of election fraud.” 

The theory that the election was stolen from Trump ultimately led to the January 6 Capitol insurrection in which five people were killed and four police officers died by suicide during the months that followed. Election deniers have failed to produce evidence of their claims that the election was rigged. 

Thompson said Schatzline’s apparent blind loyalty to Trump and willingness to raise election fraud claims without substantiating them are two more reasons why it’s going to be bad news for Texas if he becomes secretary of state. When asked if she thinks the advisory appointment signals that Schatzline is next in line for Nelson’s job, Thompson said, “It would make sense but I hope not.”

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