1. United States
2. Utah
3. Letter

Ken Paxton needs to be investigated for what amounts to a public confession of deliberate voter suppression. On Steve Bannon's podcast, Paxton boasted that blocking Harris County from mailing ballot applications to 2.4 million registered voters was what kept Trump from losing Texas in 2020. That's not a legal defense of election integrity — that's an official bragging about using his office to determine an election outcome by restricting access to the vote. What Paxton actually stopped wasn't illegal ballots. It was applications. Harris County, facing a pandemic, tried to make it easier for residents to request a mail-in ballot. Paxton killed that effort and then went on a podcast to take credit for swinging a presidential election. Texas already ranks as the hardest state in the country to vote in, according to a 2020 Northern Illinois University analysis. This was a feature, not a bug. A federal investigation into whether Paxton's actions constituted an abuse of power to suppress lawful voter participation is not optional — it's overdue.