Laura Pressley

Pressley told voters she had grown up outside Dallas, the daughter of a cattle auctioneer. She said she arrived in Austin two decades earlier as a poor single mother and succeeded against the odds. She earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, worked for 17 years in the semiconductor industry and owned a company that sold bottled rainwater. Her campaign foundered amid revelations she had previously appeared on Infowars, the right-wing website operated by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and on another occasion had said she believed data showed that military-grade explosives were planted inside the twin towers on 9/11. That comment prompted the Austin American-Statesman to retract its endorsement of her. By 2018, Pressley had become an outspoken critic of electronic voting systems that lack a paper trail. She founded True Texas Elections and recruited poll-watchers in more than a dozen counties to look for evidence of fraud in the state’s March primary that year. Afterward, she filed a complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) alleging that Democratic votes might have been undercounted.