Ogg Hired Former Head of Right-Wing “Election Fraud” Group
Misinformation and election denial has become core to the Republican strategy, both nationally and in Texas. The New York Times even published an article shortly before the midterm elections in 2022 explaining the Republican strategy and its talking points. Predictably, then, when County Judge Lina Hidalgo won re-election by about 18,000 votes, her Republican opponent challenged the results of the election.
Governor Abbott, also a Republican, jumped into the fray, saying—“election improprieties in our state's largest county may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct … [and] a thorough investigation is warranted.”
The Harris County Republican Party upped the ante, suggesting that the Harris County election administrator was “colluding” with an ‘unholy alliance’ of civil rights groups like the Texas Organizing Project to keep polls open later so that residents could vote.
Instead of using her platform to discredit the election denial and misinformation, D.A. Kim Ogg—who, by the way, did not endorse fellow Democrat Lina Hidalgo—joined the Republican chorus, and announced that she’d partner with the Texas Rangers to answer Governor Abbott’s call for a criminal investigation.
Then, in February 2023, as the Harris County District Attorney’s Office “election fraud” investigation unfolded, Ogg made a head-scratching hire—Mark Antill, who according to his own Linkedin bio, served for more than three years as National Director of True The Vote, a “controversial voter fraud watchdog” that “grew out of a Tea Party group, King Street Patriots” and “has a track record for making debunked charges of voting fraud.”
While Antill served as National Director, True The Vote—which billed itself as a non-partisan organization—even hosted events with right-wing extremists like Andrew Brietbart. True The Vote has also partnered with uber-conservative groups such as the Koch brothers, Tea Party Patriots, and Judicial Watch.
In 2010, while leading a training presentation for poll watchers, Antill managed a cursory “nothing we are doing here is untoward or illegal,” before cautioning the audience “to be very careful about who we talk to and what we explain to people about how this thing works. “Speak in generalities,” Antill continued, “Don’t go into specifics … The risk of the wrong person getting hold of this and getting this to a judge would shut this all down.” Antill then reiterated the importance of the non-disclosure agreements that volunteers must sign.
Here is a screenshot of a slide from a training presentation that Antill gave in 2012 for the “True The Vote” group, which clearly affiliates that group with the tea party group King Street Patriots:
As the Texas Observer reported, however, other groups did not share Antill’s sense that True The Vote wasn’t doing anything untoward—ProPublica has reported that “many of the group’s tactics have come under fire for intimidating would-be voters and raising the specter of voter suppression. True the Vote has been backed mainly by Republican lawmakers and opposed by voting advocates that warn of minority disenfranchisement.”
As one example, the Texas Observer describes how True The Vote and King Street Patriots started “dispatching teams of suburban poll-watchers into inner-city Houston neighborhoods,” which “generated little evidence of voter fraud” but “did result in complaints about voter intimidation and breached ethics, a lawsuit from the Texas Democratic Party, and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice … The group’s critics [view the group’s] fraud complaints [as] an attempt to intimidate minority voters, [because] such a massive roll-out of amped-up and largely Anglo outsiders challenging voters in minority neighborhoods, critics say, increases racial tensions.”
Has Antill worked on Ogg’s “voter fraud” investigation? We’ve emailed the District Attorney’s Office to inquire, and Houston Watch will update this post when DA Ogg responds. But it is important to note that as Antill himself described in his Linkedin biography, he has experience having “facilitated, maintained, and adhered to outlined procedures for logging, reporting, and statistically monitoring systems performance …. [and he also] created a web interface to validate petition signatures for a recall election.”
In other words, at least on paper, Antill has relevant skills to lend to a voting-related investigation. He also has a demonstrated record of extreme conservative bias and activism that should disqualify him from any participation in the case.
But there is a broader mystery at play here. Why would Ogg bring Antill into the office—especially while she is conducting a highly-charged voter fraud investigation—given the obvious optics of hiring a former leader of a tea-party related “voter fraud” project accused of voter-intimidation and increasing racial-tensions in Harris County?