Texas prosecutors have dropped charges against a prominent conservative activist in Houston related to allegations he was part of what authorities have called a baseless voter fraud conspiracy theory.

If elected next year, Woodfill also plans to run for House speaker. His campaign accuses his 2024 opponent, conservative state Rep. Lacey Hull, of conspiring with incumbent Speaker Dade Phelan to work against conservatives.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled that required coverage of an HIV prevention drug under the Affordable Care Act violates a Texas employer’s religious beliefs and undercut the broader system that determines which preventive drugs are covered in the U.S. The ruling was handed down Wednesday by Fort Worth-based U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, who ruled in 2018 that the entire ACA is invalid.

A prominent Houston conservative activist charged with unlawful restraint and aggravated assault had asked a U.S. attorney to provide federal marshals to help his private investigator.

The charges stem from Hotze’s hiring of more than a dozen private investigators to look for voter fraud in Harris County ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

Mark Aguirre, who was working on behalf of a powerful Republican megadonor’s group to investigate unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud in Harris County, was arrested Tuesday, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s office. Hotze was among a group of Republicans who unsuccessfully sued to have nearly 127,000 Harris County ballots tossed out this year. The company contracted approximately 20 private investigators to work on claims of fraudulent ballots in Harris County and Texas during the 2020 election. “There were no ballots in the truck,” according to a Harris County district attorney’s office press release. “We are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement.

In the state’s most populous — and largely Democratic — county, drive-thru voters are left anxiously awaiting court decisions before Election Day on Tuesday that could force them to go back to the polls. They argue that the county’s new drive-thru voting sites are an illegal expansion of curbside voting and violate Texas election law and the U.S. Constitution. An earlier legal challenge against drive-thru voting brought by Hotze, Hemphill and the Harris County Republican Party was rejected by the Texas Supreme Court last week. Harris County officials have continued to defend the legality of the program, and noted that the Texas secretary of state’s office had approved of drive-thru voting. “The GOP is doing everything possible to not allow people to vote, and I don’t think they understand that there are Republicans who also took part in drive-thru voting.”