Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton revealed in a recent interview that he believes Donald Trump would have lost Texas in the 2020 presidential election if his office hadn’t blocked mail-in ballot applications from being sent to all registered voters in Harris County.
During a conversation with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on the “War Room” podcast, Paxton, a Republican, detailed the actions his office took to prevent the mail-out of applications to over 2.4 million registered voters in the Houston area. Citing concerns over election integrity during the COVID-19 pandemic, Paxton’s office filed a lawsuit that ultimately led to the conservative Texas Supreme Court stopping Harris County from distributing the applications.
“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 stated, referring to the potential impact of mail-in voting on the election outcome.
Paxton went on to say that without this intervention, Texas could have faced a scenario similar to other battleground states, where election results were delayed due to extensive vote counting. “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,” he said. “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 2020 election saw a surge in mail-in voting due to the pandemic, leading to various legal challenges and debates over voter access and security.
Harris County, which leans Democratic, had aimed to increase voter participation by mailing out the applications to help residents safely vote during the pandemic.
