Texas‘s Attorney General, Republican Ken Paxton, says Joe Biden was prevented from winning the state because his office was able to block the mailing of 2.5 million absentee ballot applications in Harris County, which is home to Houston.
“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots, 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 Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Friday, according to Newsweek.
FiveThirtyEight, the analytics site, had the election at 48.6 percent for Trump versus 47.4 percent for Biden on election day.
But Trump ultimately won 52% of the vote in Texas.
Paxton’s remarks come as Republican lawmakers at the state level take steps to make sure election fraud doesn’t accelerate under a number of COVID-inspired measures from last year.
“In 43 states across the country,” says the Washington Post, “Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.”
Paxton says that because of the legal action taken by the state of Texas, the state was able to avoid late-night voting halts, and days-on-end vote counting that marred other states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Those irregularities have made conservative voters doubt the official results of the election.
“Had we not done that,” said Paxton, “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.”
