2021-06-06

Texas AG: Trump would have lost if he hadn’t blocked mail-in ballot applications

In my opinion, the biggest thing going on in Politics today is the Republican party doing everything it can to stay in power, despite having increasingly unpopular policy positions.

Newsweek has an article about Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton saying that Trump would have lost Texas in 2020 had he not blocked counties from sending mail-in ballot applications.

Here’s Paxton:

“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.”

Newsweek points out that this statement is wrong: Harris County wanted to send mail-in ballot applications (and not ballots) out because there was a pandemic going on.

In order to get an actual ballot and vote, the recipients of the applications would have had to mail the applications in and be found to be legitimate voters. Paxton has to be aware of this difference.

Should we be surprised at this:

A 2020 analysis of U.S. election laws by Northern Illinois University ranked Texas as the most difficult state for voting.

The For the People Act has a number of provisions to ensure that those legally eligible to vote can vote easily, and that their vote counts. Some of the provisions, such as eliminating gerrymandering, are incredibly popular.

This needs to pass, but Republicans don’t want it to because easier, more representative voting makes it harder for them to stay in power, despite those features being ideals of a democracy.

Minims

On a lighter note, Minims are like maxims in that they sound proverbial but have no general application at all.