Election Security
Floor Speech
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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the right to vote is the most fundamental and essential feature of our democracy. As Abraham Lincoln said, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not be possible if it weren't for citizens who cast their ballot at every available election.
From city councils, to school boards, to Presidents of the United States, the American people have a right and, I would argue, a duty to make their voices heard. In 2020, a record number of voters did just that. Nearly 160 million Americans cast their ballot, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all eligible voters. If you compare that to 2016, just 4 years earlier, 17 million more people voted in the last election. This included higher turnout across all racial and ethnic groups--African Americans, Caucasians, Hispanics, Asians. Each had a higher turnout this election.
When Congress originally passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the goal was to eliminate common discriminatory practices that were in place at that time. It was and it is a landmark piece of legislation. There is no question it has been an overwhelming success, and I think that is something we should celebrate as a nation.
In 2012, for the first time on record, turnout among Black voters was higher than for White voters. In 2020, both Asian and Hispanic voters turned out at the highest rate on record. We certainly have come a long way, as the preamble to the Constitution says, in our effort to form a more perfect Union, but we should not tire, nor falter, nor fail in our progress to make sure that everyone who has the right to vote has an opportunity to cast their ballot.
Before every election--and 2020 was no different--there is a widespread effort to register new voters and encourage more citizens to participate. In Texas, we set new records in registering and turning out voters. We turned out 11.3 million voters, 66 percent of those registered. In the years to come, I hope we will set new records and get more voters to the polls. I think that goal should be shared by every American.
But in addition to this work, we have a responsibility to protect the integrity of the ballot. This became a focus in particular after the 2016 election when we actually saw Russia try to interfere with the Presidential election that year.
In response, Congress provided hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up State election security measures and to help local officials safeguard future elections. Our intelligence community and particularly the National Security Agency and Cyber Command made sure that there were no cyber attacks or minimized the impact of potential cyber attacks on election voting systems, including voter registries and the like. The postmortem reviews were that they were pretty successful in deterring those sorts of attacks that occurred in 2016.
But it is not just up to the Federal Government; across the country, States are also fighting to make sure that those who are legally entitled to vote can do so and ensure the integrity of their own elections. They are looking at ways to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat, which I think should be our goal. But those election security efforts have been mischaracterized, unfortunately, by many of our Democratic colleagues and many in the news media who falsely claim that somehow there are efforts underway at the State level to suppress minority voters.
We saw this play out in the case of the Georgia election law in particular. Our Democratic colleagues tried to frame this legislation as a way to suppress minority voters, but that was completely contrary to the facts, and it was completely contrary to the election laws in their own States.
The Georgia law, for example, set a deadline of 11 days before an election to request a mail-in ballot. In the home State of the Democratic leader, Senator Schumer from New York, voters only get a week--11 days in Georgia; a week in New York. And in New York, you have to give a reason for voting absentee. In Georgia, under the proposed changes to the State election law, you don't even have to give a reason to vote absentee.
Georgia also expanded early in-person voting to 17 days. In Massachusetts, represented by two of our Democratic colleagues, early voting lasts only 11 days.
The President's home State of Delaware won't even offer early voting until 2022. In other words, you can't even do it now, and it won't be available until 2022, and even then, voters will have only 10 days.
Well, I think this demonstrates the hypocrisy of some of the debate we are hearing and seeing.
New Jersey, represented by two Democratic Senators and a Democratic Governor, recently passed a law that expanded in-person voting to 9 days. As a reminder, Georgia just expanded theirs to 17 days. But the New Jersey Governor had the temerity to criticize Georgia for ``restricting the rights of Georgians to vote'' when it is more expansive than the voting laws in his own State.
We have heard similar lines of attack from many across the aisle who falsely try to brand this law as a form of voter suppression. Once you play the race card, it is hard for people to think clearly because it tugs at our emotions. It tugs at our collective, frankly, guilt, emanating from the earliest days of our country that we have come a long way to try to rectify.
But here is the bottom line: Each State has the authority to determine the ``times, places, and manner of holding elections.'' Where does that come from? Well, that is article I of the Constitution of the United States of America. But our Democratic colleagues insist on pushing for a one-size-fits-all mandate that turns federalism, including the Constitution itself, on its head.
Senator Schumer, the Senator from New York, has said that this month, the Senate will vote on a bill called S. 1, which is the Democrats' effort to commandeer control of elections from the States. The bill is so radical that Members of his own party have lined up against it, and it is easy, on superficial inspection, to see why.
In order to vote in person, 36 States require some form of voter identification. That was the recommendation of the Commission that former President Carter participated in, along with James Baker III--a prominent President, a Democrat, and a prominent Republican. They made a recommendation for voter ID, but this proposal, S. 1, would eliminate it.
In my State, Texas, there are several options to present voter identification. You can present a driver's license, a passport, a military ID, a citizenship certificate. If you don't have any of those, you can get another one issued by the State at zero cost. Those all work.
This Democratic proposal would stop States, would actually block the States from requiring voter identification--something you have to do when you buy a six-pack of beer or cigarettes, for those who still smoke, or get on an airplane or even enter a Federal building. You have to produce an identification to do so. But S. 1 would prohibit the States from making that requirement when exercising your most sacred right as a citizen. What would they require? Well, you sign a piece of paper saying you are who you say you are, and nobody can ask you any questions.
The invitation for fraud doesn't stop there because this proposed legislation also legalizes something called ballot harvesting. That means that mail-in ballots could be collected by political partisans, whether it is paid campaign staffers or anyone who has a stake in the outcome of the election--not an impartial third party but a partisan who has a stake in the outcome of the election. They could harvest those ballots.
It goes so far as to specify that the States ``may not put any limit on how many voted and sealed absentee ballots any designated person can return.'' So there are no limits on how many ballots a political operative could harvest and turn in and count in the election. Well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how this can go wrong. Maybe the ballots get turned in with thousands of others. Maybe some of the ballots are altered. Maybe some are falsified. Maybe some end up in the trash. It is tough to know exactly what might happen.
S. 1, this Federal commandeering of State-run elections, is rife with opportunities for fraud. It mandates things like automatic voter registration and ballot drop boxes, while making it more difficult for the States to maintain accurate voter lists.
It would even go so far as to make it harder for the States to remove dead voters from their rolls. My State, like many States, has an unfortunate legacy of having candidates and political parties cast a ballot on behalf of voters who are no longer alive--box 13, for example. Arguably, that is the way Lyndon Johnson beat Coke Stevenson, by voting the cemetery vote. And that is not unique.
Why would Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi be pushing this takeover of State-run elections? Well, it is pretty obvious. They think that our Democratic colleagues will reap the benefits of hijacking State election laws. That is really their goal here. They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections. They want to take power away from the voters and the States and give themselves every partisan advantage they can.
Those are just some of the features of S. 1. There are others. It would make changes to the Federal Election Commission, which currently has six members, three from each political party. This is intentionally designed to protect the Commission from partisan politics. Regardless of which party controls the Senate or the White House, the FEC will always be fair and balanced. Well, that doesn't serve the interests of our Democratic friends, so they want to change it. The election takeover bill would remove one of the seats held by a Republican and turn the Federal Election Commission into a partisan body--no more equal representation, no more consensus building. Why bother with that when you can steamroll an agenda with no opposition?
Then there is the taxpayer funding of elections. Instead of political candidates going out and making the case to prospective voters, instead of supporters voluntarily backing their preferred candidates with their hard-earned dollars, this bill would force taxpayers to bear the financial burden, even to the point of channeling dollars, your tax dollars, to candidates whom you disagree with who support policies that you do not support. And it is not even a dollar-for-dollar match. I don't know who came up with the idea of $6 from the taxpayer for every dollar that is raised from voluntary donations, but that is the proposal. What a deal. That means if somebody gives a candidate 200 bucks, the Federal Government could match it up to $1,200.
Our Democratic colleagues even managed to get on the wrong side of the American Civil Liberties Union. This bill would implement a new disclosure policy that the ACLU says ``could directly interfere with the ability of many to engage in political speech about causes that they care about.''
But as bad as this proposal is, S. 1, if that doesn't work--and it is looking like, from reading the news recently, it is not likely to work because of defections, even among Democrats--our Democratic colleagues have a plan B.
I want to remind you of what I said at the outset, that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was one of the most important laws passed in modern American history. It has been reauthorized a number of times over the years, most recently in 2006. I proudly cast my vote in support of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act. But a new bill introduced by our friend the Senator from Vermont, the senior Senator, sometimes invoking the name of that civil rights icon, John Lewis, his proposal would radically change the law as well, this time putting the Federal Government, not the State, in charge of new voting laws again.
Just a reminder: Back in 1965, part of the Voting Rights Act required States and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to receive Federal preclearance before they could put new laws into effect.
In 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the portion of the law that set the formula for which States were included in that requirement. The Court ruled that it was unconstitutional because the coverage formula was outdated. The Court said history did not end in 1965.
Indeed, what happened when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, the proponents of that bill made no accounting for the tremendous progress in minority voting turnout that we have seen since that time. In other words, the Voting Rights Act worked. It worked miraculously, and thank goodness it did.
But the Supreme Court, in striking down the 1965 formula as opposed to the current-day rate of minority voting, the Court said the Congress based the law on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day.
Here is an example: The formula in 1965 required States to receive preclearance before they could put their own voting laws into effect if they had any test or device, as it was called, that restricts voting. That included things like literacy tests or subjective determinations of moral character. But thanks to the Voting Rights Act, those practices are nowhere to be found today.
The bill introduced by Senator Leahy, the senior Senator from Vermont, would change the formula with language so broad that virtually every State in the Union and every local jurisdiction would have to get their election laws precleared by the Biden Justice Department before they could put them into effect. The trigger for that is a vague number of voting rights violations that wouldn't even require a finding of intentional discrimination. Nevertheless, these State and local governments would be required to get the sign-off of partisan bureaucrats at the Department of Justice to exercise their own constitutional authority.
I think it is important to keep in mind that the Framers of the Constitution wanted the States to chart their own course in elections, not Washington bureaucrats. To quote the Supreme Court of the United States, ``The Framers of the Constitution intended the States to keep for themselves, as provided [under] the Tenth Amendment [to the Constitution], the power to regulate elections.'' Yet, in any instance where your local election official wanted to make a commonsense change in the way your elections were actually carried out, you would have to ask ``Mother May I'' to the Department of Justice.
Based on this proposal, you would think there have been countless unenforced instances of voter discrimination that cry out for this sort of remedy, but you would be wrong.
The Department of Justice already has authority under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group. During the entire 8 years of the Obama--the Obama--Justice Department, they filed only four enforcement cases in the whole United States under section 2--four.
So the narrative of widespread voter suppression is nothing but a propaganda tactic designed to support a political outcome. The push for a Federal takeover of elections is not about voter suppression at all. It is about unconstitutionally seizing power and never letting go.
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