Less than 24 hours before the momentous US midterms, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) traded virtual punches with actor Jim Carrey. "Everyone knows the dead vote Democrat," he fired back at Carrey after the actor depicted him as a vampire.
On Sunday, Carrey posted a political cartoon illustrating the close-cut Texas Senate race between Cruz and Democratic challenger –and Carrey's own favorite– Beto O'Rourke. O'Rourke is shown drawing back the curtains and letting the daylight into the room. The bright light turns Cruz, pale-faced and red-lipped, to immediate flight.
The drawing went with the caption: "Vote like there's no tomorrow. Let's make this Tuesday like the end of every great vampire movie." The recipe for the victory, according to Carrey, is simple: "Pull back the curtains and let the sunshine turn all bloodsuckers to dust."
The political satire has been liked over 65,000 times and retweeted over 15,000.
Cruz, who like Carrey was born in Canada, hurried to strike back at the Hollywood star.
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On Monday, the Republican hopeful retweeted the cartoon but with the caption of his own, in which he took aim at Hollywood's liberal bias and alleged voter fraud by the Democrats.
"Hollywood liberals all in for Beto. But (self-described socialist) Jim Carrey made a mistake here: Vampires are dead, and everyone knows the dead vote Democrat...." Cruz tweeted.
Cruz didn't say so straight out, but some Republicans, including US President Donald Trump, have long alleged voter fraud by electoral commissions who allow undocumented migrants, unregistered voters and even those long deceased to stay on voter rolls.
The 2012 Pew Survey, cited by the Trump administration and the President himself as the ultimate evidence, found that some 1.8 million dead voters were still on the books and some 2.75 million were eligible to vote in more than one state per registration data.
Trump unleashed a clampdown on illegal votes, establishing a now-defunct Presidential Commission on Election Integrity to clean up the voter rolls. Democrats have scolded the new election registration policy as an encroachment on the voting rights of their base, fearing that minorities would be purged from the ballots.
One story, fueled by right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, alleges that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore lost Alabama special elections to Democrat Doug Jones last December because of the dead constituents 'voting' disproportionally for Jones in a tiny rural community. The theory has since been debunked, but the legend apparently endures.
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