Will Texas' new top voting official be a 'disruptor'? Locals are preparing for it

Just months ahead of closely contested midterm elections, Texas is about to get a new top voting official.

Many locals there fear the frontrunner is a 34-year-old conservative state lawmaker and pastor with no election administration experience.

In Texas, the governor picks the secretary of state, and it's unclear when Republican Gov. Greg Abbott will make a formal announcement. The current top elections official, Secretary of State Jane Nelson — who announced her resignation earlier this month — is expected to stay in office until July 17.

For weeks though, signs have pointed to Nelson's successor being state Rep. Nate Schatzline, a pastor at a Fort Worth megachurch with ties to Christian nationalism, who has repeated baseless claims about widespread fraud in American elections.

"I personally have not heard of another name floated," said Chris McGinn, executive director of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, the professional organization for the state's hundreds of local voting officials.

In preparation for the announcement, McGinn drafted an analysis report for his members on how Schatzline could affect elections this year as secretary of state. It noted that previous secretaries of state, including Nelson, have been institutionalists who "prioritized stabilizing relationships with county officials, providing bipartisan-friendly training resources, and shielding local administrators from overt partisan warfare."

Schatzline, however, would seem to present a change.

"It is believed that Schatzline would represent a disruptor model of [secretary of state] leadership: highly ideological, responsive to grassroots activist demands, and comfortable using the office as an active enforcement agency," McGinn's report said.

Schatzline, who is not running for reelection for his statehouse seat, did not respond to an NPR request for an interview or comment. An Abbott spokesperson did not respond to questions about Schatzline, saying only that "an announcement on an appointment will be made at a later date."

The outgoing secretary of state, Nelson, was also a state lawmaker before taking over voting in Texas. And it's not unprecedented for a secretary of state to lack election oversight experience.

But should Schatzline take over the office, he would have his work cut out for him to quickly get up to speed on the intricacies of running voting in the state with the second-most registered voters in the country, and several competitive races that could decide the balance of power in Congress.

"He has never run an election, managed a polling place, or operated a county voter registration database," McGinn's report noted. "This lack of practical experience may lead to the SOS office issuing administrative directives that are logistically impossible or highly disruptive on the ground."

Schatzline turned a legislative focus on voting in the last year. He authored no election-related bills his first session in the Texas House, but authored or co-authored at least five in the 2025-'26 session.

And in interviews and social media posts, he's made it clear he is aligned with President Trump's false views about elections.

"It's not even debatable the amount of election fraud we had through mail-in ballots. It's not even debatable that the machines were screwed up and that we've seen unbelievable amounts of election fraud," Schatzline said in an interview last year with John Herold, an election denial influencer who helped popularize a QAnon-adjacent election conspiracy theory after 2020.

Schatzline is also an ally of the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in the state, Attorney General Ken Paxton. Schatzline voted against impeaching Paxton when he was embroiled in scandal in 2023, and Paxton posted online that he was "proud to call [Schatzline] a friend" in 2025.

It is highly unusual for a state election official to leave their post this close to a federal election. But the timing of Nelson's departure — after the Texas legislature is already out of regular session — means whoever Abbott appoints can hold the job in an acting capacity until next year, when the legislature meets and votes on a permanent replacement.

Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, says that means whoever is appointed can act with less accountability this election cycle.

"We don't get to see if this person is qualified to do the job and do an actual job interview until they've gotten to do the most single most important function of this job," Gutierrez said, noting this isn't the first time Abbott has appointed a secretary of state in a similar way.

More broadly, Gutierrez worries any pick from Abbott's office that pushes the office in an overtly partisan direction would have downstream effects this November in an election where "the stakes could not be higher."

"This job is incredibly important," he said. "There's just a really long list of things that someone in that position could do if they saw their job as being more political than just … supportive."

NPR correspondent Ashley Lopez contributed reporting.