Impeached Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been under indictment for fraud for the last eight years, told Steve Bannon, also under indictment for fraud, that if he had not intervened, former President Donald Trump would have lost in Texas during the 2020 election.
"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 said on Bannon's War Room podcast. Naturally, Paxton lied to Bannon's listeners — Harris County planned to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Paxton's office successfully blocked this initiative through litigation.
In the end, Trump emerged as the winner in Texas, securing over 600,000 more votes than Biden. Nevertheless, polls leading up to the election had suggested that Biden had a chance to win the traditionally conservative state, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976.
Thanks in no small part to Big-Lie-spreader Paxton, Texas has become the most difficult state for voting.
From Newsweek:
A 2020 analysis of U.S. election laws by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas as the most difficult state for voting. While absentee voting is allowed in the state for anyone over the age of 65 without an excuse, the state requires those younger to have a valid reason for requesting an absentee ballot. While Democrats believed the COVID-19 pandemic should be an acceptable excuse for any registered voter to cast their ballots by mail, Paxton and other Texas Republicans disagreed.
Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers in Texas want to make it more difficult to vote in the state. Their efforts have been largely animated by Trump's baseless claims that Biden won the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud. These false allegations have already been thoroughly litigated and wholly debunked, while the former president and his allies have failed to provide evidence to substantiate them.
