Texas AG Ken Paxton: 'Competition is over, we have a one-party rule' if TX loses election integrity

The Texas Attorney General explains the fight over election integrity in his home state.
District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine (L) and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speak during the launch of an antitrust investigation into large tech companies outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on September 9, 2019.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has concerns about election integrity in the Lone Star State while there remains a push to make it like Georgia or Arizona during the 2020 election.

Paxton told the John Solomon Reports podcast, "We know that there was a massive number of mail-in ballots this year. Those are hard to monitor and they're hard to verify, even if you have things for verification, which many of these states eliminated illegally."

"And so, even in Texas, I have concerns that there could have been a large number of votes that were fraudulent. And so, we're certainly in the process of looking at some of those and we're going to continue to pursue election integrity because there's really nothing more important for our democracy than confidence in the election system, because if people don't have that, then they're not going to vote because there's no reason for them to vote."

He explained that while his office won the battle last year for election integrity, the war continues.

"We fought hard to protect our state laws, the laws that were passed by the elected representatives, and that local judges were trying to change and local elected officials would just arbitrarily, unilaterally change on their own."

Paxton continued, "And we had to go to court — I think we had 12 different cases related to these important election provisions, of which we won every single one of them. Had we not, I'm pretty convinced we would have been similar to Georgia or Arizona, or some of these other states that ended up having election issues and counting for days on end."

He discussed his concern about the possibility of Texas becoming a permanently blue state.

"But we still have our challenges here. And they're still going to be pushing here just like they did in those other states that were battleground states. They want Texas because they know if they get Texas, you know, it's pretty much game over. Competition is over, we have a one-party rule," Paxton warned.

"And I've never been a fan of one-party rule because one-party rule leads to corruption because there's no accountability. So it's very concerning to me. And we will not stop looking at this and trying to figure out if we've got other issues to deal with in Texas."

Paxton is also fighting Big Tech's allegedly monopolistic practices as the alternative social media platform Parler was taken offline in January.

With regard to finding out what happened between Twitter, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Facebook and Google, Paxton said, "We haven't gotten our information back … each of these companies has a certain period of time to respond. We haven't gotten it all back yet, we're waiting on that."

"So I don't have a lot of information to add other than just our initial concern that they have colluded with other companies, potentially, to deplatform Americans that they don't agree with their speech. And we're not talking about speech that's obnoxious, we're talking about speech that's just different viewpoint from what these companies hold," Paxton explained.

"And so we end up having consumers treated differently than advertised. And since these companies often hold a monopoly, especially when you deplatform competitors, you end up creating no competition. And you deplatform and eliminate competition so that consumers, if they're getting pushed off of one platform, they can go to another, but then competition is taken out. There's something wrong with that and that's our concern."