We know now who’s in charge of elections in Texas. Hint: It’s not Gov. Greg Abbott

Texans now have a clear picture of who’s in charge of election law in this state.

It’s not Gov. Greg Abbott. It’s not the secretary of state, a currently open position that nominally oversees the administration of elections. It’s not even Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, though he’s no doubt cheering the latest development.

It’s Donald Trump.

The former president issued a typically fatuous statement Thursday that urged Abbott to let lawmakers consider calling a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election results. In Texas. A state he won pretty handily.

“Your citizens don’t trust the election system, and they want your leadership on this issue, which is the number one thing they care about,” Trump wrote.

Hours later, the secretary of state’s office announced that, voila!, someone found that current law allows an audit in the two largest Democratic counties, Harris and Dallas, and the biggest Republican ones, Tarrant and Collin.

Trump won Texas by a smaller margin, about 5 points, than any Republican presidential candidate in decades. He narrowly lost Tarrant County, the first GOP candidate to do so in more than 50 years.

Such results, and Trump’s loss in longtime Republican strongholds such as Arizona, have led to his insistence that the election was stolen. In the Grand Canyon State, a ballot examination orchestrated by Republicans in Maricopa County found no significant error or fraud in the results. If anything, it found Biden’s margin of victory should have been slightly larger.

Oh, that “audit” has reportedly included searches through boxes of ballots for evidence of bamboo in the paper, on the theory that fake ballots were brought in from China.

Sure, let’s bring that circus to Texas.

Abbott said nothing about Trump’s request, but the secretary of state’s office wouldn’t have scrambled to comply without at least the governor’s consent, if not a nudge from his office.

Tarrant County has been at the center of much of this nonsense about fraud. It even spilled over to this year’s election for mayor, which has been questioned because more voters turned out than usual. It can’t have been an open seat and a large number of well-known candidates that did it. It had to be cheating!

There’s nothing concrete that anyone can point to about how such cheating might have occurred. Instead, there’s vague talk of “computer models” that show supposedly suspect voting patterns. Just stare at it long enough, and like one of the magic-eye posters, you’ll see the conspiracy unfold in the air before you.

That mayoral election, by the way, was won by a Republican, Mattie Parker. Those crafty Democrats — their fraud is so sophisticated, they sometimes don’t bother to win elections with it so no one catches on. Plus, they rigged the 2020 vote to bring down Trump’s total but not win any statewide races or control of the Legislature. Clever.

Sen. John Cornyn, who outperformed Trump in Tarrant and elsewhere at the top of the 2020 tickets, recently framed what really happened in Texas’ urban areas. “We knew President Trump was particularly challenged when it came to his appeal to suburban women,” he told the Texas Tribune’s Abby Livingston in a livestream event.

In other words, Cornyn knew that to ensure his re-election, he had to get past Trump’s baggage. It was perfectly plausible that a deeply polarizing president would create a new group of ticket-splitters, and that’s what happened, even though Trump still comfortably won Texas.

The fact that Texas’ elections were clean and well-executed is obvious. But Secretary of State Ruth Hughs, Abbott’s last appointee to the position, may have had to give up her post because one of her deputies dared to testify that the balloting was “smooth and secure.”

With Hughs gone, the missive from the secretary of state’s office announcing the “audit” bore no official’s name. But then, we don’t blame the career officials trying to keep the office going. We wouldn’t want to claim this baloney, either.

It’s pitiful that no Republican in power in Austin has the gumption to tell Trump — and more importantly, his voters — “no.” Neither Abbott nor Patrick, who has called for audit legislation, will declare that elections consistently won by their party are legit. Neither will guide their voters away, even subtly, from unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories.

And neither will stand up for the hard-working election officials and volunteers who pulled off the quadrennial miracle of a presidential election amid a pandemic and record turnout, either.

For months, Arizona has been a laughingstock on this issue. Now, it’s Texas’ turn to play the fool, simply because Donald Trump demands it.