Ted Cruz says President Trump 'absolutely right' to call out mail-in ballot fraud concerns
'Mail-in ballots are particularly susceptible to fraud,' he says
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}President Trump is "absolutely right" to call out mail-in ballot voter fraud concerns ahead of the 2020 presidential election, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said on Tuesday.
“When it comes to elections, we want elections to be safe, we want them to be secure. We want when you go to cast a vote so that vote counts and the integrity of the election be protected,” Cruz told “Fox & Friends.”
“The problem with mail-in ballots is that people wonder why is this such a big fight?” Cruz said.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}MAIL-IN VOTING FACES SLEW OF ISSUES NATIONWIDE, AS EMERGENCY USPS MEMO SOUNDS ALARM
Trump said Monday that it could take two months for Americans to see a result from November's presidential election -- a comment that came amid a tense back-and-forth over the merits of universal mail-in voting during an interview with Axios journalist Jonathan Swan.
The comments during the "Axios on HBO" interview come as the debate over universal mail-in voting -- which a number of states are doing despite Swan incorrectly asserting otherwise several times during the interview -- has reached a fever pitch. Universal mail-in voting is a relatively novel practice in the U.S. in which states are mailing ballots (not applications for ballots) to all voters whether they request one or not. While a handful of states did this before the coronavirus pandemic, the list has grown this year amid health concerns.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Some states, like Maryland, are mailing absentee ballot applications to voters rather than the ballots themselves. And such voting, requiring an application to get an absentee ballot, has long been common in the U.S. What is new is states mailing ballots to voters unprompted.
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Cruz said that mail-in ballots are “particularly susceptible to fraud" and highlighted "voter harvesting" in California.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}“In Texas, we have stringent standards on when mail-in ballots are allowed and the origins of that. You go back to the Texas Legislature when they adopted those standards. It was at a time when there were a lot of Texas Democrats and there was a lot of voter fraud, particularly, in Texas Democratic primaries,” Cruz said.
“You can go back and look at the legislative history where elected Democrats in the Texas Legislature were describing how mail-in ballots would be used to steal votes from unsuspected Democratic voters -- many of them African-American or Hispanic who didn’t know that it was unscrupulous partisans who were stealing their ballots and casting them for whatever candidate had paid or whatever candidate had hired them to go engage in stealing votes.”
Fox News' Adam Shaw contributed to this report.