Rep. Dan Crenshaw pushed back hard on Democratic claims that his state of Texas and others run by Republicans are denying their citizens the right to vote.
In an appearance on former GOP lawmaker Trey Gowdy’s Sunday evening Fox News program, Crenshaw argued in favor of Texas’ new election law while calling voter suppression both a “lie” and a “myth.”
“The Texas election law is very transparent, and frankly, it’s a little boring,” Crenshaw explained. “It doesn’t do a whole lot of things that Democrats say it does. It just cleans things up. It cleans up the process.
“It does things like make all of the early voting times the same across counties, so people don’t get confused, put additional I.D. requirements on mail-in ballots because look, there is a bipartisan 2005 commission on elections that specifically stated — this was bipartisan by the way — that mail-in ballots are the source of a lot of different fraud, so we’re just cleaning up some of these things so that there is less opportunity for fraud,” he added.
“It doesn’t make it harder to vote. It makes it easier to vote, in many cases. We have weeks of early voting in Texas. It is extremely easy to vote,” the Texas Republican continued.
“Look, there are a few things that are true here: One, the voter suppression lie is just that — it’s a lie. It’s a myth. Number two, no one believes the myth. About 80 percent of voters believe in voter I.D.,” he added. “And 44 percent of Americans also believe we have too lax of voting laws to prevent fraud. OK? And look, the Texas law doesn’t do any of that,” he said.
Several current and former black leaders joined in an April op-ed to voice their support for strengthening voter ID laws following the chaotic 2020 election.
“America is a country of over 300 million people. We are comprised of every shape, size, nationality, and opinion. This diversity has proven to be one of our greatest strengths,” the coalition of black leaders including U.S. Rep. Burgess Owens, former Florida Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll, former Texas state Rep. James Earl Wright, and former mayor of Cincinnati and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights Ken Blackwell, wrote at RealClearPolitics.
“However, if you listened to largely white liberal media personalities and elite CEOs, you wouldn’t know this. According to liberal orthodoxy, all Blacks think alike, and all Blacks support Black Lives Matter, and all Blacks oppose the recently enacted Georgia Election Integrity Act,” they added.
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The coalition cited a Rasmussen Reports survey that recently found 69% of blacks and 82% of nonwhite minorities are in favor of voter ID. Also, the group cited a separate poll by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper that found two-thirds of blacks in the state of Georgia support voter ID even after the passage of a controversial law that Democrats say discriminates against minorities after it strengthened voter identification laws, among other things.
“This shouldn’t be surprising. Blacks know the value of the right to vote. We struggled to win that right in a country that for too long treated us as second-class citizens. We shed our blood so we could partake in American elections just like every other American citizen,” the coalition wrote.
“We want to make sure that sacred right to vote, and the integrity of those elections, are protected. It’s clear that most Blacks support voter ID, and it’s obvious why we do so,” the group added.