“He said, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and he stuck his hand inside his coat.  When I tried to help him, he pulls out a gun. That’s when he told me to get on the ground.”

Mark Anthony Aguirre, a vigilante vote-fraud hunter, ran an air-conditioning repair truck off the road. Then Aguirre put a gun to the repairman’s head—and demanded the driver, David Zuniga, open up the back of his truck. Aguirre believed that Zuniga was smuggling 750,000 forged absentee ballots, all “voting” for Biden, enough to win Texas.

Zuniga, rightly frightened for his life, opened the back of his A/C repair truck to reveal…A/C ducts and pipes. No forged ballots.
 
The gunman was not some lone crazy: In October 2020, he was paid a stunning $266,400 by a right-wing Texas billionaire, Steven Hotze, who had hired dozens of vigilantes in the hope of proving that Joe Biden was trying to steal the election by stuffing ballot boxes with forged ballots.
 
In Houston, I met with the man who supposedly forged these 750,000 ballots, Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis. Harris County is better known as Houston, Texas.

“I was accused that I masterminded this scheme to forge all of these mail-in ballots,” the Commissioner told me. I pressed him on how he miraculously faked all these ballots. I did note that, at 8 seconds per ballot, it would take him several years to sign them all.
 
Ellis said, “First, I’m too lazy to forge hundreds of thousands of ballots. You’ve got to be nuts. The vigilante stopped this air conditioner repair guy. He said he was a police officer.  He had the guy on the ground, with his pistol on the guy.”
 
Ellis is the first African-American elected Harris County Commissioner. And that’s a BIG problem for Donald Trump. (We’ll get to that.)
 
By the way, it’s particularly difficult to stuff ballot drop boxes in Texas – because there are none. Never mind. The MAGA-nauts don’t let facts get in the way of their stolen-election fever-dreams.

“Trump would have lost Texas.”You may be wondering, “Why would Democrats think they could to steal Texas? Texas is redneck red.” Even with nearly a million fake ballots, you’d think Biden could not have possibly won the state.
 
No so. Texas has the highest Black population of any state in the USA. Absent the truly vicious vote suppression tactics instituted by the state’s GOP rulers, Texas would be Democratic blue.
 
Here’s the back story. In 2020, Commissioner Ellis, because he didn’t want Houston residents to contract Covid while waiting in voting lines, was about to mail out ballots to all eligible Houston voters—as was done in many states, including California and Georgia. 
 
But Ellis was stopped by Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton. In an appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room, Paxton said that Commissioner Ellis, “Was going to mail out 2.5 million ballots, all illegal, and we stopped them. If we had not done that…Donald Trump would have lost [Texas].”
 
[Paxton, FYI, had last year narrowly escaped removal from office after his impeachment for financial corruption.]
 
I took a walk through downtown Houston with the Commissioner. We were joined by his armed guards. “I have to take the protection now,“ he explained, after men with assault weapons surrounded his house while his frightened daughter held a pajama party. 
 
Ellis said, “There were people outside my home with signs one day saying STOP THE STEAL. One idiot is out there with a rifle on his shoulder. I take security now.” So, now we can add to our list of vote suppression tactics: Armed terror.
 
But that doesn’t mean Texas has abandoned new Jim Crow/Jose Crow assaults on democracy. Since 2021, the state has purged 1.1 million voters from the rolls to prevent voter fraud—when not one voter has been convicted of casting an illegal ballot. 
 
But the state’s Republican governor is so frightened of Harris Commissioner Ellis turning out voters this November that he’s threatening Putin-style prison sentences for Ellis and his fellow officials.  Gov. Greg Abbott said this week on FoxTV that, “Harris County is refusing to follow the laws. And two things need to happen. One is investigations and prosecutions need to take place against Harris County officials.”
 
Prison time for Commissioner Ellis is not enough. Harris County recently decided to send out voter registration forms to Houstonians. In retaliation, Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton are threatening a state takeover of the county’s elections operations. 
 
Commissioner Ellis is undaunted, but concerned. “The level of vitriol out there, it’s just amazing.”
 
Commissioner Rodney Ellis is featured in our new film, “Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen,” opening in Hollywood on September 6 for a one-week-run and Oakland on September 25.
There are still tickets available.