texas attorney general ken paxton, a republican, said former president donald trump would have lost texas in the 2020 election had his office not stopped counties from sending mail-in ballot applications to all registered voters .
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Harris County, home to the City of Houston, wanted to send mail-in ballot applications to its estimated 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. however, the conservative texas supreme court prevented the county from doing so after facing litigation from paxton’s office.
“if we had lost harris county, trump won by 620,000 votes in texas. the harris county mail-in ballots they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, they were all illegal and we were able to stop them all.” Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter’s war room podcast on Friday.
“if we hadn’t done that, we would have been in the same situation: we would have been on election day, I was looking at election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would have It would have been Texas. We would have been in the same boat. We would have been one of those battleground states that was counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would have lost the election.” the Republican official said.
Notably, the Texas Attorney General conflated mail-in ballots with requests for mail-in ballots in his comments to Bannon. Harris County did not attempt to mail actual ballots to registered voters, only requests to request them if the individual voter wanted one.
as paxton pointed out, trump won the traditionally conservative southwestern state by more than 600,000 votes. While President Joe Biden won 46.5 percent of the state’s more than 11.3 million votes, Trump won about 52.1 percent. Pre-election polling had suggested Biden had a chance to flip the red state, which last opted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976.
an analysis of 2020 from us. uu. The Election Laws of the University of Northern Illinois ranked Texas as the most difficult state to vote in. While absentee voting is allowed in the state for anyone over the age of 65 without an excuse, the state requires younger people to have a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. While Democrats believed the COVID-19 pandemic should be an acceptable excuse for any registered voter to cast a vote by mail, Paxton and other Texas Republicans disagreed.
Meanwhile, Texas Republican lawmakers want to make it harder to vote in the state. His efforts have been greatly encouraged by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Biden won the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud. these false accusations have already been thoroughly litigated and fully debunked, while the former president and his allies have provided no evidence to substantiate them.
Texas House Democrats blocked what they saw as a voter suppression bill from moving forward in late May. Democrats walked out of the afternoon legislative session on May 30, denying Republican lawmakers a quorum to pass the legislation. Although that prevented the bill from moving forward, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has promised to call a special session in a further effort to pass changes to the state’s election laws.
newsweek has contacted paxton’s office for further comment but did not immediately hear back.