In another example of Republicans saying the quiet part out loud, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an interview that Joe Biden would have won the Lone Star state if not for voter suppression.
Last fall, Harris County – the largest county in Texas and home to Houston – wanted to mail absentee ballot applications to all of the county’s registered voters. Throughout the country, absentee voting was popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several counties and states took the initiative to make the process of mail voting easier.
Texas Republicans would have none of that, though, as the formerly reliably red state transitions to a purple hue. Paxton’s office sued Harris County, and the conservatives on the Texas Supreme Court killed the plan.
According to Newsweek:
“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter’s War Room podcast on Friday.
“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation—we would’ve been on Election Day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election,” the Republican official said.
So here we have an elected statewide official bragging on a podcast with an avowed white nationalist that he overruled a local elected official and successfully rigged an election, denying Harris County voters an opportunity to simply receive a mail-in ballot application.
Paxton, by the way, was indicted on securities fraud. Former aides to the Texas AG have accused him of “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” Amazingly, he continues to serve as the top law enforcement officer in the state of Texas.
Meanwhile, even as state-level Republicans rush to pass as many voter suppression bills as possible across the country, Senate Democrats (namely Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) are dragging their feet on a national voting rights law that would protect our democracy.