Like most of his political endeavors, Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine trust in the American electoral system have been a bit scattershot. For example, it would not seem particularly fruitful for him to demand a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election results in Texas—not only because there has been no evidence to support claims of fraud in any state, but because Trump won this particular one by more than 600,000 votes. But that’s exactly what he did in a letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott last week, reportedly confusing state officials as much as anyone else. In doing so, the former president seemed to contest his own win in Collin County, one of the four counties in which he demanded an audit. (The three others—Tarrant, Harris, and Dallas—went to Joe Biden.) 

“There was a mad dash” within the governor’s office “to determine if Trump was actually being serious with his statement,” a Texas aide told Politico, which also demanded Abbott add an election audit bill, known as HB16, to this year’s third special session of the Texas Legislature. But Abbott’s staff had reason to take the former president at his word, given Texas was not the first state that Trump had called upon to conduct a performative post-election audit. One such review in Arizona concluded on Friday; the final report not only failed to vindicate Trump’s conspiracy theories but actually widened Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Not that the findings meant anything to Trump, who during a rally on Saturday continued to use election-related lies to galvanize his base.

Within hours of Thursday’s letter from Trump, the Texas secretary of state’s office put out a statement saying it had “already begun the process” of reviewing votes. Later, Abbott told Fox News Sunday that such reviews “began months ago,” a claim his press secretary echoed in a statement to Politico. But that narrative is at odds with reports from CNN and the Texas Tribune in which local officials said they were unaware of any post-election audit underway prior to Thursday. The last Texas secretary of state departed in May; Abbott has yet to appoint a replacement. “The secretary of state’s decision to call for audits in the four largest counties in Texas was predicated on Trump’s statement mentioning Gov. Abbott,” an aide affirmed to Politico.

Abbott isn’t the only Republican leader scrambling to appease the former president with a nonexistent smoking gun. GOP lawmakers in Wisconsin are supporting three separate election investigations, NPR reports, while Republicans in Pennsylvania this month voted to subpoena millions of voters’ personal information as part of a review of its 2020 election results. Other Republicans are less enthusiastic. “The conspiracy theorists who want to come up with all these ways or reasons why this election wasn’t right—they might very well find something else [to doubt],” Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, a Republican, told the Texas Tribune. “It’s time to move on.”

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