Ted Cruz’s Mom Listed As Eligible To Vote In Canada on Recently-Surfaced Document
The controversy surrounding Canadian-born U.S. Senator and Cuban-American evangelical Ted Cruz‘s (R-TX) citizenship, and therefore eligibility to run for president, continues to roil. In a document first obtained by TPM but first released by Breitbart News (that’s a long story), Ted Cruz’s mother is included on an official list of people eligible to vote in Canada in 1974. Breitbart News showed the document to, and obtained a statement from, the Ted Cruz campaign:
A document uncovered by Breitbart News indicates that the parents of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) were named on a Calgary list of electors for Canada’s federal election of July 8, 1974.
Ted Cruz’s parents are listed as “Cruz, Eleanor, Mrs.” and “Cruz, Raphael, self employed,” both at 920 Riverdale Avenue, South West in Calgary, Alberta.
Canadian law restricts (and restricted) federal voting rights to Canadian citizens.
In a statement to Breitbart News—the full text of which follows this article—Jason Johnson, chief strategist for Cruz for President, said that “the document itself does not purport to be a list of ‘registered Canadian voters.’ All this might conceivably establish is that this list of individuals (maybe) lived at the given addresses. It says nothing about who was a citizen eligible to vote.”
Johnson added: “Eleanor was never a citizen of Canada, and she could not have been under the facts or the law. In short, she did not live in Canada long enough to be a Canadian citizen by the time Cruz was born in 1970: Canadian law required 5 years of permanent residence, and she moved to Canada in December 1967—only 3 years before Senator Cruz’s birth.”
The document is a “preliminary list of electors,” and not a record of those who actually voted.
The statement put out by the Cruz campaign is actually quite lengthy, clocking in at about 550 words, an indication that they’re at least taking this somewhat seriously.
In a separate drama, TPM included their own lengthy explanation of how they obtained this document almost three years ago, but still managed to get scooped by Breitbart:
Yet Cruz’s mother’s name appears on a Canadian government document, obtained by TPM in 2013, that lists Canadian citizens eligible to vote in 1974.
TPM shared an electronic copy of the document with Sen. Cruz’s office when it originally obtained the document in 2013. Cruz’s then-communications director, Sean Rushton, emphasized that the document is not a record of people who actually voted in any election. He further pointed out that the document itself provides notice that “applications for corrections,” “deletions from,” and “additions to” the list may have been necessary.
“At least one other error is evident on its face: the name of Sen. Cruz’s father is misspelled,” Rushton told TPM in his 2013 statement. “Regardless, Mrs. Cruz has never been a Canadian citizen, and she has never voted in any Canadian election.”
TPM eventually decided not to publish an article based on the document at the time, in part because Cruz was not yet a candidate for president. TPM decided to revisit the story earlier this week as rival Donald Trump renewed his skepticism about Cruz’s eligibility, moving the story to the center of the campaign, and was prepared to publish this evening.
Then late Friday afternoon, Breitbart.com published an article about the same document TPM had shared with Cruz’s office in 2013, a voter list for the southern district of Calgary, alongside a lengthy, exclusive statement from the Cruz campaign.
U mad, bro?
The relevance of this document is questionable in any case, since even if Mrs. Cruz had been eligible to vote, both she and Ted Cruz would still have had dual U.S. citizenship. The question isn’t whether Cruz is a U.S. citizen, it’s over what the definition of “natural born” is.
Here’s the full document, courtesy of Breitbart News:
