Ted Cruz's campaign is under fire for a mailer sent to encourage Iowans to caucus on Feb. 1. | AP Photo Trump rips 'dishonest' and 'deceptive' Cruz mailer The Republican secretary of state says 'voting violation' piece is 'not keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.'

AMES, Iowa — Right before heading to church, Donald Trump ripped Ted Cruz’s campaign on Sunday morning for sending mailers to Iowa voters designed to look like official documents that accuse them of a “VOTING VIOLATION” for failure to turn out in past elections.

"The Cruz campaign issued a dishonest and deceptive get out the vote ad calling voters 'in violation,'" Trump tweeted. "They are now under investigation. Bad!"


Trump's comments come after Iowa’s top elections official condemned the mailers on Saturday, though he did not announce any investigation.

Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate said in a statement that Cruz’s mailers, which has the words “official public record” printed in red at the top, “misrepresents the role of my office, and worse, misrepresents Iowa election law.”

“There is no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting,” said Paul, who was elected statewide as a Republican in 2014. “Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.”

The controversial Cruz mailers show the name of the person receiving the mail at the top and then give them a grade on an A to F scale. Below, it shows their neighbors and their voting scores. It then urges them to caucus next week and warns, “A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.”

Political science studies have shown that such voter-shaming and peer-pressure techniques can be effective to motivate less likely voters. Past campaigns have sent such mail but they come at the risk of backlash from voters who feel their — and their neighbors’ privacy — has been compromised.

Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said Saturday that the piece was “a standard mailer that folks at the Iowa Republican Party and other get-out-the-vote groups have used to help motivate low-propensity voters.”

“We're going to do everything we can to turn these folks out,” she said. She did not immediately respond to comment about Pate’s criticism.

The Republican Party of Iowa did not immediately respond to requests about whether they had sent such mailers in the past.

As for Pate, he said in his statement, “The Iowa Secretary of State's Office never 'grades" voters. Nor does the Secretary of State maintain records related to Iowa Caucus participation. Caucuses are organized and directed by the state political parties, not the Secretary of State, nor local elections officials.”

But Matt Schultz, Cruz's Iowa State chairman and a former Iowa secretary of state, argued in response to Pate that the mailers are "common practice to increase voter turnout."

"Our mailer was modeled after the very successful 2014 mailers that the Republican Party of Iowa distributed to motivate Republican voters to vote, and which helped elect numerous Republican candidates during that cycle," he said.

Cruz pointed to Schultz's comments on Saturday night in Sioux City, arguing that his campaign had done nothing wrong.

“I will apologize to nobody for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote. Our country’s in crisis,” he told reporters.

But several of Cruz's rivals seized on the mailers to make the case that the Texas senator's campaign was fighting dirty.

"Tactics of a career politician #busTed," Rand Paul tweeted.

Marco Rubio told reporters in Ames that voters had approached him about the Cruz mailer. “They were upset about it obviously. They had people’s names and they gave them an F rating for how they voted. I think a lot of voters are disturbed by it,” he said.

Rubio suggested Cruz was getting desperate in the campaign’s final days, calling it “an unusual way to end your campaign in the state.”

“You’ll have to ask him, you know, how he’s feeling about his campaign but it doesn’t sound like he’s feeling too good,” Rubio said. “It sounds like he’s under a lot of pressure and maybe not reacting very well to it. Which is I problematic because presidents are under pressure every day.”

The mailers were first reported by the Independent Journal Review. A top Cruz surrogate in Iowa, radio host Steve Deace, initially declared that the story was a “fake” on Twitter but later corrected himself. He questioned the backlash, which he called "horse puckey."

“Over 90% of the people who have asked or expressed outrage about these mailers to me today don't live in Iowa,” he wrote. “I'm keeping track.”

That tweet came before the statement from the Republican secretary of state.

Kyle Cheney contributed.