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If Texas Gov. Greg Abbott hired a fellow Republican to handle election security issues, there would be good reason to be concerned. The fact that he brought on former State Rep. Nate Schatzline to do that job meant something else was probably afoot.
That’s because Schatzline isn’t any kind of election security expert. He’s just another run-of-the-mill MAGA cultist who happens to be a Christian pastor and culture “warrior.”
When the Tarrant County Courthouse installed a massive Ten Commandments monument in front of the building earlier this year, Schatzline delivered an invocation at the dedication saying, “We don’t just make room for you, God, we give you Tarrant County. Father, we rededicate this land, this county. Tarrant County is the Lord’s.”
And when Texas announced in 2025, during a measles outbreak, that Mercy Culture Preparatory Academy, a private Christian school, ranked dead last when it came to vaccination rates for students, Schatzline was thrilled. His own children attended the school and he represented its district. In a post online, he said, “I’m upset… that we haven’t celebrated sooner!… Way to go MC Prep! You’ve earned a medical freedom award from my office!”
That’s the sort of guy Schatzline is: He doesn’t care about evidence. He’s not interested in what experts have to say. He’s already made up his mind based on whatever his right-wing tribe says, and he believes it’s his job to promote those positions—while invoking the name of Jesus. So what if his beliefs are harmful to everyone else? That’s the Christian Nationalist Way.
Schatzline also sponsored a bill to restrict drag performances (even though he himself wore a dress for a video stunt). And he voted against the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton despite overwhelming evidence of his corruption.
This past July, Schatzline resigned from his seat after Abbott made him a senior advisor” on election integrity with a mandate to head up “policy development and legislative strategy efforts related to election integrity.” It was a strange ask given his lack of expertise, but it made sense given Schatzline’s knee-jerk support of the MAGA world. He said the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump—it wasn’t—and sponsored a bill that would have limited mail-in voting to people who are 65 or older, making it harder for younger, more liberal-leaning voters to cast their votes. (That bill failed.)
With the election now on the horizon, it’s fair to ask what he’s accomplished.
Has Schatzline defeated the fake threat of election fraud? Has he developed any policies to that effect?
Of course not. But Robert Downen of the Texas Tribune has a closer look at what he’s done in the job… and it has nothing to do with elections at all. Instead, he’s gone after Muslims.
But his primary focus was an existential menace: “The greatest threat to our Western society right now is the rise in Islam in the state of Texas,” Schatzline told the members of Texas First Conservative Alliance, a grassroots GOP group based in Lampasas County. “And by the way, I want you to notice something, because the governor agrees on this: I didn’t say ‘radical Islam.’ I said ‘Islam,’ because all Islam is radical.”
Among his goals for the coming year: preventing mosques from serving as polling places; cracking down on what he claimed is a Muslim practice of casting votes on behalf of long-dead relatives; and working with Abbott and right-wing Texas House members to reclassify Islam as a political ideology—a move that the far right has long sought so that it can legally target Muslims without running afoul of religious-liberty protections. In the meantime, Schatzline suggested, mosques could be invalidated as polling places if they were provoked into discriminating against non-Muslims. “I might just have to start eating bacon every time I vote,” he said to laughter.
There’s no evidence mosques that are polling places are discriminating against non-Muslims. There’s no evidence of Muslims casting votes on behalf of dead people—and if that actually happened, the law already prosecutes it.
But this is the sort of bigotry that Texas Christians—including those in power—have been leveling against Muslims for a while now. Muslims represent about 2% of Texas, yet as we’ve seen in Michigan (with Abdul El-Sayed) and New York City (with Zohran Mamdani), it’s become very fashionable on the right to pretend even liberal Muslims are going to institute “Sharia Law” if elected. Republicans have no actual policies to run on, so they’re doing what they always do and trying to scare gullible white Christians into voting for them—as if not doing so would pose an existential threat to them.
As the Texas Tribune notes:
… Bo French, the nominee for a position on the Texas Railroad Commission, has argued that we must “round up” every Muslim. Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee for attorney general, has claimed that sharia adherents don’t believe Christians “deserve the right to exist.” Ahead of the 2027 legislative session, far-right Texas House members have discussed how they might make life in America inhospitable for the Islamic community. And in June, at the Texas GOP’s convention, delegates openly celebrated the party’s lurch toward overt Islamophobia, pushing for Muslim Republicans to leave the party and branding Islam a “disease.”
So what has Schatzline done with his new $275,000/year job to fix elections?
It’s not clear. He said early in his tenure that he would launch a vaguely described “faith initiative” that involved “mobilizing the Church,” by which we can assume he’s referring to Christians. Other than that, he’s spent a lot of time just trashing Islam and bragging about how Republicans will treat them in the future:
He also discussed a recent meeting between Abbott and leaders of the Texas House’s new “Sharia Free Caucus,” whose members have argued that they must overtly discriminate against Muslims. Their goal is to“peel out all of these little infestations of ideas that are contrary to our way of life,” according to Andy Hopper, a state representative who Schatzline said was at the meeting with Abbott. To that end, they have proposed banning the sale of halal food and forbidding women and girls from wearing hijabs in public schools.
…
Until then, he said, he is working on a more nuanced problem: how to craft policies that allow Muslims to be targeted without putting Christians at similar risk. “Anything we set into stone, they will turn around and use it against Christians as well,” he explained. “We want to do it in such a way that it doesn’t put our law enforcement in a difficult position, where they’re cracking down and are going to infringe on religious freedom [in ways] that can then be weaponized against believers and Christians.”
Soon after, an audience member chimed in: “[Islam] is a method of conquest,” he said.
“Yeah,” Schatzline replied. “Agreed.”
Schatzline didn’t respond to the Texas Tribune’s request for comment. But given how polling suggests Republicans in Texas may not fare well, discriminating against minority groups may be Republicans’ only hope for maintaining their iron grip on power. By lying about a misunderstood group of brown people, Schatzline and his allies are clearly hoping to convince other conservatives that their biggest problem isn’t with the Republicans in power screwing them over, but with a fraction of the population that doesn’t vote with them. If pushing religious bigotry is the way to do it, that’s what they’ll do.
As if the biggest concern about elections is that Muslims participate in them—not that Republicans have made it harder for everyone to vote by limiting early voting, trying to remove polling sites in blue-leaning communities, making it harder to vote on college campuses, etc. because those are all ways to give Republicans an edge.
That’s the takeaway here. By bringing on Schatzline to help with “election integrity,” Republicans in Texas made clear that they see Muslims voting at all as the biggest threat to the system—despite the fact that they’re relatively small as a population and despite the fact that Republicans are actively suppressing votes in other ways. The problem is coming from inside the house, yet white conservatives like Schatzline want to blame a Democratic-leaning minority group without a shred of evidence because they know their base, full of white evangelicals, is racist and bigoted enough to fall for their lies.
Here’s hoping Tuesday provides a clear rebuke to the way conservatives have manipulated their own voters and gives Texans a check on their power.
Republicans constantly call out election fraud every time they lose an election. However, on those rare occasions when fraud is discovered there is almost always a Republican behind it. Right wing lunacy backed up by religious certitude is a dangerous combination.
“𝐼 𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑜𝑛 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝐼 𝑣𝑜𝑡𝑒,” ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡𝑒𝑟.
This is a mostly empty threat, because polling place is dictated by address. He can't just walk into some place across town and vote there because it happens to be a mosque.
But let's say he does, not to actually vote but just to make a scene. I'm pretty sure a polling place can have a 'no food' rule, simply for cleanliness. Also pretty sure they can remove people who are being disruptive. Heck in my district, you can't even carry a political sign into within something like 50' of the polling place, so you can be asked to leave (or remove your sign) even if you aren't causing a disturbance.
So this dude can easily get kicked out of a mosque polling place, if he's determined to get kicked out. And no doubt he'll then play the victim despite there being some perfectly normal secular reason for his booting.