If you don’t follow Pennsylvania politics, you might not be familiar with Doug Mastriano, the state senator who clinched the Republican nomination for governor in May. Mastriano’s profile rose in far-right circles when he became one of the leaders of the Pennsylvania “stop the steal” movement. Mastriano helped organize large rallies in the state to agitate for false claims of election fraud, chartered buses to take protesters to the Capitol on January 6, crossed police barricades at the Capitol himself during the riot, and attempted to submit “alternate” (i.e. fake) pro-Trump electors to the official count. He was even invited to the White House to discuss the “stop the steal” strategy with Donald Trump.

If Mastriano wins the Pennsylvania general election this November, he will choose the secretary of state — the official in charge of administering the 2024 presidential election in a state where Trump lost by less than one percent in 2020. Mastriano himself is well aware of this. He has said that as governor he would decertify voting machines in some precincts (making it hard to count votes there), and he has alluded to the independent state legislature doctrine, which holds that state legislatures can name whoever they want as the recipient of a state’s electoral votes, regardless of who voters select.

The notion that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election is hardly Mastriano’s only fringe position. Mastriano has called the separation of church and state “a myth,” and promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats run a secret child trafficking ring dozens of times. He wants to make abortion illegal in all cases, even when carrying a pregnancy to term could kill the mother.