The Texas Nationalist Movement has called on Governor Greg Abbott to convene a special session on election security before the November general election, in a statement its president released on July 16 responding to the federal government’s declassification of records on the security of American elections.
The statement from Daniel Miller, the movement’s president, followed a set of intelligence and law-enforcement files the White House released this week through its Government Transparency Task Force. According to those records, the People’s Republic of China collected more than 200 million U.S. voter records, the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency found the software and networks that run elections open to attack, and the Department of Homeland Security identified roughly 278,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls. The Partisan reported on the disclosures when they were made public.
“We called it,” Miller wrote. “For more than fifteen years the Texas Nationalist Movement has warned that the system counting Texas votes is not safe and was never built to be.” He pointed to a report the movement published in 2019 on the DEFCON Voting Village, where security researchers broke into every voting machine they were handed.
Miller was deliberate about what the files do and do not show. “Can I prove an election was stolen? No,” he wrote. “Can anyone prove one wasn’t? No.” His argument was that the breach reached the parts of the system no audit examines, the voter rolls and the machines themselves, and that Texans are told to trust a system they are forbidden to inspect.
The statement laid out the measures Miller said belonged on a special-session call. A moratorium on electronic voting machines for the November general election, with Texans voting on hand-marked paper. The paper-ballot and audit reforms Representative Steve Toth and Senator Bob Hall have carried in past sessions. A separation of Texas’s state and local elections from the federal ballot, the approach Representative Mike Schofield authored and Senator Bryan Hughes advanced. Documentary proof of citizenship to register. A ban on voting machines with foreign ownership, foreign parts, or a live internet connection. And Texas control of its own voter data.
The demand runs into the calendar. The Texas Legislature meets in regular session only in odd years, and the next one does not convene until January 2027, months after the election Miller wants secured. Only the governor can call lawmakers back before then. The reforms Miller cited carry their own record in Austin: the Toth and Hall bills died in committee in 2023, and key provisions of the state’s 2021 election-security law were later struck down by a federal judge.
That record is the movement’s point. Its position, argued for two decades, is that a system built to federal standards and run under federal mandates cannot be secured from inside the union, and that the only durable fix is a Texas that runs its own elections as an independent nation. Every reform in the statement, in that framing, is something a self-governing Texas would decide for itself and a Texas inside the union must ask Washington to allow.
“Every step is practice,” Miller wrote, “for the day Texans stop asking and hold the whole of it themselves.”
For fifteen years the movement was told the warning was a conspiracy theory. This week the government that ran the system put the warning in writing.
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