Texas is one of the many red states that has instituted
sweeping changes to its voter laws.
And this of course happened after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election,
even though there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Now, the results from the primary election in Texas had some unusual outcomes,
namely the number of ballots that were thrown out or disqualified.
Texas throughout mail votes at an abnormally high rate during the nation's
first primary of 2022, rejecting nearly 23,000 ballots outright.
Under tougher voting rules that are part of a broad campaign by Republicans,
to reshape American elections.
So I want to give you a few examples here, for instance,
in Harris County-home to Houston, the state's most populous county.
Officials said they rejected a whopping 19% of the mail ballots
they received, or 6,888 mail ballots in total.
During the primary election in 2018, the county had only rejected 135 mail ballots,
out of the more than 48,000, election officials said in a statement.
That's less than 0.3%, so clearly they're disqualifying or
throwing out far more ballots.
And I'll tell you why, in just a moment, but there's some,
in my opinion, intentional efforts in place to make it difficult for
people to vote by mail, so their vote actually counts.
And by the way, can you guess which party had more rejected ballots?
The Democrats, the rejection rate was higher in counties that
lean Democratic, 15.1% vs 9% for Republicans.
Now, let's go to what we're noticing,
roughly 13% of mail ballots returned in March 1st or in the March 1st primary,
were discarded and uncounted across 187 counties in Texas.
While the historical primary comparisons are lacking,
the double digit rejection rate.
Would be far beyond what is typical in a general election,
when experts say anything above 2% is usually caused for attention.
And I have more examples for you, and and an explanation as to why so
many of these ballots are likely to have been rejected.
And it has to do with how the ballot was put together, but Cenk,
do you have any thoughts on these numbers so far?
>> Yeah, so those last two numbers were devastating, so
you can sense that it is a new effort to block voting.
Because before 2% rejection rate was like, whoa, we got to look into this,
something went wrong.
Way too many legitimate voters are being blocked from voting,
because that rate is, 2% is way too high, now it's at 13%.
So, look, we've told you that voter fraud, for example,
in the state of Florida in the 2020 election,
there was three votes out of millions cast, just three voter fraud.
Two of them were for Trump, and we've told you before,
it's like 0.00006% of the people that vote have voter fraud.
So if you want to address those three folks, but
then you block hundreds of thousands of people from actually voting and
exercising their rights in a democracy.
Do you think that's a good balancing of interests,
even if you thought that voter fraud was a legitimate issue?
Now, I know you don't think that and I'm going to prove it to you in a minute,
okay, but you see the severity of the case here.
Now the other numbers is how I'm going to prove it to you, so as Ana read to you,
if you're in a Republican district, they blocked 9.1%.
If you're in a Democratic district, 15.1%, that's a 6% difference,
most elections are decided within six points.
That's a massive advantage, if you can block Democratic voters in general,
at a rate 6% higher than Republican voters.
So this is exactly what they used to do in the Jim Crow era, where they would say,
okay, you're a Republican voter, or you're a White voter in that case.
And really, is there much of a difference these days, okay, you can come in and
guess the jelly beans in this jar.
And no matter what you guessed, they would say correct, you can vote, and
they would say the same thing with a Black person.
And then no matter what the number was, even if they miraculously got it right,
nope, incorrect you can't vote, okay.
So now here they're saying, well, I guess Democrats are being blocked at a greater
rate than Republicans, there's nothing we can do about that.
No, there is something you could do and you did this on purpose, and
it doesn't have anything to do with the voter front.
And now wait, if you're a Republican, you still love this and you say Cenk,
you didn't prove your point, I love this.
I don't know what you're talking about, it probably happened by coincidence, anyway,
I'm sure there was a legitimate reason.
All right then let me flip it,
would you mind if the Democrats blocked Republican votes by 6% more?
>> Of course they would, I mean they were making up stories about
Republican ballots being thrown in the ocean, whatever.
There were all sorts of conspiracy theories about it and
by the way, if there is any suspicion, they should be concerned,
ballots shouldn't be thrown out.
And so why were so many of these ballots disqualified?
We should talk about that,
because it seems as though they put the ballot together in a way,
hat made it very easy to make a mistake that would get it disqualified.
So the newly designed envelopes for mail-in ballots utilize what's known as
a secrecy flap, that covers up the ID number.
To protect voters privacy, officials said they fear voters
are not seeing that part of the form as a result, so there's.
>> Yeah they covered it, and by the way.
>> It's literally called the secrecy flap.
>> Yeah, so and then when you don't see that, and you don't provide the idea,
they say, and they throw it out.
Well you say well that could apply to Republicans just as much, but yet
magically it didn't.
It applied to Democrats at a six point high, and
by the way it's six points overall in the percentage of the population.
But when you compare 9-15 it's a much bigger percentage,
that were blocked on the Democratic side.
Oops, you will never find an election in Texas where Republican votes are blocked
at a greater rate than Democrats, never, you think that's a coincidence?
If we did it in a blue state in California, we blocked Republican
votes at 10%, 25% greater rate than we blocked Democratic votes.
Would any Republican in their right mind think, yeah, that's probably legitimate,
it's probably a coincidence?
Well the Republicans didn't see it as much as the Democrats saw it,
well it's probably the Republicans, you would never accept that.
Why don't you just be honest for one second in your life,
you would never accept that and nor should you/ We actually want everybody to vote,
but Republicans don't, they're obviously cheating in Texas.
>> Right, and look we don't know, did Democrats,
because if you turned in your ballot early enough.
The election officials would reach out to you if you made that mistake, and
help you correct it, so you could resubmit your ballot.
So was there any type of campaign by the Republicans,
to ensure that their voters were fully informed about it?
Because look, to be quite honest with you guys, rejecting 9.1%,
of Republican voters ballots is also unacceptable.
>> Totally unacceptable.
>> Right?
>> 2% is unacceptable,
you're blocking nearly five times more Republican voters than you should.
And you're blocking what, let's do the math,
eight times more Democratic voters than you should.
You shouldn't block either one of them, they're obviously cheating.
If you're a Republican who said that you care about election reform, make sure we
have election integrity, great, then why don't you care about election integrity?
All of a sudden when they're cheating on your side, you love it,
God, have you ever seen a Republican be honest about anything?
>> So, I also want to kind of share some details,
about how much money Texas is wasting, on a problem that doesn't even exist.
Because there's a lot of money going to this newly-found election integrity
unit in Texas/ Where Attorney General Ken Paxton, announced his new
election integrity unit in October, to investigate election crimes.
The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent
$2.2 million dollars, and had closed a whopping three cases.
>> By the way, they just blocked tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Republican
voters, let alone Democratic voters, based on three voter fraud cases in Texas.
Does that make sense to you guys, if you're a Republican who lived in Texas,
and they threw out your vote based on this?
And they threw out all your neighbors votes, based on this,
that doesn't make any sense.
That's not how you would address the three freaking cases you had in your state,
by the way, you know how they address it.
They arrested those guys, as they should, that's how you address it, that's why,
by the way, it almost never happens.
Because there's actually really harsh penalties for committing voter fraud.
>> Dude, we can barely get half of Americans to want to vote in
the first place, the idea that there's a mass amount of people.
Conspiring to do voter fraud to ensure that Republicans don't get elected is
insane.
But I want to go to the last graphic here, because I think that this anecdote
perfectly sums up what Republicans are trying to do with these voter laws.
Dan And Joyce Wilson, 86-year-old residents of a senior living
home in Austin, say they will never try to vote by mail again.
After a confusing and frustrating experience in the March 1 primary,
the couple said the 2020 election process felt more efficient.
And Joyce Wilson said,
it felt like someone was trying to discourage them from voting this time.
Yeah, nailed it.
>> That's exactly what happened, so look, Republicans are never going to
have principles, they're never going to fix this.
You could explain this to a Republican voter or a politician,
and he could concede that it is obviously true.
That they're blocking more Democratic voters, and they're cheating on purpose.
And he'll still say, yeah, but I have power and you don't, because we
misunderstand their intentions in their minds, we are fighting for justice.
They are fighting for their own superiority, they want to be superior to
us and they want to make sure they have more rights than we do.
So we misunderstand them, we care about justice, they care about power,
that's the reality.