Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, does not appear to have a basic understanding of what actually occurred during the 2020 election cycle in the United States. Of course, he already led a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the presidential election results in four states where Biden won, so his detachment from reality was already pretty clear. During an interview that aired on the Fox News show Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend, Paxton claimed that Georgia did not employ “signature verification” for mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election process, which is a flat-out lie.
In fact, Georgia election workers verified the signatures that were submitted with every single mail-in ballot in the state. Georgia authorities subsequently re-checked 15,000 signatures that had been submitted with mail-in ballots in Cobb County, which is in the vicinity of Atlanta, and they did not discover a single instance of fraud.
Paxton suggested that Georgia flipped to Biden in 2020 specifically because of the imaginary fraud that Trump allies have consistently claimed plagued the process. There is no legitimate evidence whatsoever for this alleged fraud.
Nevertheless, Paxton commented as follows:
‘I absolutely am questioning. I know what would have happened here. They would have stopped counting — just like they did in those states, and they would have been counting mail-in ballots until they get the right number of votes, and suddenly Trump loses, and we lose the state House here, we lose some of our Supreme Court justices — and it wouldn’t have been a legitimate, and it wouldn’t have been a legitimate count, because it wouldn’t have followed state law.’
Paxton’s insistence that authorities “stopped counting” in certain states is a lie. In fact, in certain states, authorities were legally constrained from counting mail-in ballots until Election Day (or after polls closed on Election Day), meaning that a somewhat delayed and drawn-out counting process was built into the legislative framework for the election. In 2020, for instance, Georgia authorities were forbidden from counting mail-in votes until the morning of Election Day.
Paxton added as follows:
‘It’s almost impossible to prove the fraud because they separated the ballots. [Georgia] never did the signature verification. So, the proof, the evidence is gone. But we do know they didn’t follow state law, and I know that in Texas, had they not followed state law, that we would have lost the election because there would have been more opportunity for fraud.’
Again, Paxton is lying. Signature verification was completed for every single mail-in ballot, and separating ballots from the envelopes in which they arrived after completing that verification is not some nefarious scheme — it’s a basic provision meant to ensure the secrecy of individual voters’ choices.
Watch below:
Maria Bartiromo and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton push the big lie about the 2020 election pic.twitter.com/QxKrVOiCfE
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 2, 2021
