Nearly 200 Republicans who backed Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election are on the ballot this November, according to a count by States United Action, a nonprofit that tracks election deniers. Capital & Main reported the tally on October 21: 163 races for Congress, and 30 more for statewide offices that help run elections — governors, attorneys general and secretaries of state.

The group counts someone as an election denier if they spread Trump's lie about 2020, refused to certify the result, or tried to overturn it.

Capital & Main profiled nine of the people on that list, and all nine have report cards on this site. They are far from the only ones: Perry alone led eight Pennsylvania Republicans who voted to reject their state's result, and six of those eight are running again. Some are running for governor. One is running for the U.S. Senate. The rest want to go back to the House. If they win, several of them will be in a position to sign off on — or refuse to sign off on — the 2028 election.

Six of them voted to throw out two states' votes

On the night of January 6, 2021 — after the mob had been cleared out of the Capitol — and into the early hours of January 7, the House voted on objections to Joe Biden's wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both objections failed. Six of the nine people on this list voted for both of them:

• Scott Perry (Pennsylvania)
• Ken Calvert (California)
• Andy Biggs (Arizona)
• Jim Jordan (Ohio)
• Tom Tiffany (Wisconsin)
• Byron Donalds (Florida)

Every one of those votes is on the record: the Arizona objection and the Pennsylvania objection list each member by name, and all six are marked "Yea" on both.

A month before that, five of them — Perry, Calvert, Biggs, Jordan and Tiffany — had already signed their names to a brief at the U.S. Supreme Court backing a Texas lawsuit that asked the justices to throw out the results in four states Biden won. The Court refused to hear the case, ruling that Texas had no standing to sue. The man who filed that lawsuit is also on this list.

None of the more than 60 court cases over the 2020 election found evidence of fraud, according to Campaign Legal Center, and Trump's own election security officials called it the most secure election in American history. Capital & Main asked the election-denying candidates it wrote about in seven states for comment. Not one answered.

Who they are, and what they did

Scott Perry, running for re-election in Pennsylvania's 10th District, was a key ally of Trump in planning how to overturn the result, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee report. He introduced Trump to Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department lawyer Trump tried to put in charge of the department before the Capitol attack — Perry has said he only "obliged" Trump's request for the introduction. Clark drafted a letter telling Georgia lawmakers that the Justice Department had "significant concerns" about their election. Trump only backed off when top Justice officials threatened to resign together. On January 6, Perry led the eight Pennsylvania Republicans who voted to reject their own state's result.

Stacy Garrity, the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, spoke on January 5, 2021, at a rally meant to push state lawmakers to decertify the result, saying "the election from this November is tarnished forever." Her campaign says she wasn't talking about the presidential race. In 2022, pointing at Trump at a rally, she said, "We know that he won." This August, asked directly whether Trump lost, she opened with "Yeah" — then said "we know there were irregularities" she couldn't describe, and that she'd "rather look forward." A week later she told CNN that Joe Biden was elected.

Ken Calvert is one of two California Republicans running for re-election who voted to reject the 2020 results. He's now running in the redrawn 40th District against another Republican incumbent, Young Kim, who did not join the challenges.

Andy Biggs, the Republican nominee for Arizona governor, voted to throw out his own state's result. He and two other members wrote to Arizona officials demanding they audit every ballot cast in 2020, and he has claimed, with no evidence, that there was widespread fraud in Arizona. An organizer of the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally said Biggs helped plan it; Biggs denies that. In August he said "I never made comment on the pardon" of January 6 rioters — and his own X account turned out to have demanded them.

Ken Paxton, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, is the Texas attorney general who filed that lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out four states' results. He hasn't let it go: in March 2026 he called the 2020 election "stolen" in a post on X.

Jim Jordan, running for re-election in Ohio, played a major role in Trump's effort. Two days after the race was called for Biden, he was among a group who met with Trump to plan the next steps, according to The New York Times. Asked in December 2020 whether Trump should concede, Jordan said, "No way." He kept pushing fraud claims for months. A week after January 6, he insisted he had never said the election was stolen — a claim CNN fact-checked as misleading.

Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for Wisconsin governor, was one of two Wisconsin House Republicans who voted to reject the results on January 6. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he would have objected to Wisconsin's own result if he'd been able to, and defended his vote by claiming election officials had illegally altered ballots — something a nonpartisan audit found no evidence of. He has since changed his explanation to "Zuckerbucks", and he called it "good news" that Trump's Justice Department is "coming to Wisconsin" for this election.

Derrick Van Orden, running for re-election in Wisconsin's 3rd District, wasn't in Congress yet in 2021. He was at the Capitol instead: he joined "stop the steal" rioters on the Capitol grounds and paid for the trip with donor money left over from his losing 2020 campaign. He wrote in an op-ed that he went to "stand up for the integrity of our electoral system," and claimed there was "a tremendous amount of voter fraud." He says he did not go inside the Capitol.

Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for Florida governor, was sworn in days before January 6 — and one of his first House votes was to overturn Biden's win. Asked point-blank in 2023 whether he believes Biden was a legitimate president, he answered: "I mean, me, personally? No."

Why it matters for 2028

Governors certify their state's presidential electors. Members of Congress vote on whether to count them. The people elected next week will be in office when the 2028 results come in.

Some of these nine have tried to put 2020 behind them. Tiffany now says "Joe Biden won" and that he'll certify whoever wins the most votes in Wisconsin in 2028. A Garrity spokesperson told CNN she would accept and certify the 2028 result. Donalds has not made that promise — in 2024, he dodged CNN's question about whether he'd certify that year's winner.

What the record shows

Six of these nine Republicans — Scott Perry, Ken Calvert, Andy Biggs, Jim Jordan, Tom Tiffany and Byron Donalds — voted the night of January 6, 2021, to throw out Arizona's and Pennsylvania's votes, and five of them signed a Supreme Court brief backing Ken Paxton's lawsuit to throw out four states' results. Stacy Garrity rallied for decertification and later said "we know that he won," and Derrick Van Orden spent leftover campaign money to join the "stop the steal" crowd at the Capitol. All nine are on the ballot November 3, and five of them are running for governor or the U.S. Senate.

Source

Jan. 6 election deniers are back on the ballot — Pennsylvania Capital-Star, republished from Capital & Main