Let's Strengthen the Sanctity of the Vote

"Thank you Chairman Steil for your leadership, for taking this on, and for all of my colleagues who got involved in this process of cleaning up elections to make sure that we can ensure that elections across America will be fair [and] that people who are legally eligible to vote can actually cast that ballot. And that people who aren't legally eligible to vote can't undermine the vote of everyone else because, if someone illegally votes, they take away the vote of a legally voting American.

"And ultimately, if you look at where this goes back to, you know, a lot of states have had problems over the years and worked to fix them. I come from a state -- in Louisiana when I was in the state legislature, we had serious problems with our elections in Louisiana. You know, you look at other states where people, [when] they mentioned the state and they [would] just laugh and they just think, "That's just the way that it goes.' You know, we had that in our state until so many of us got fed up, that we ultimately exposed the fraud that was going on and we sent our elections commissioner to jail. He went to federal prison for the things that they were doing: stealing elections in the state of Louisiana. And after we did that, we cleaned up our election process and I'm proud to have been on the committee -- the House and Governmental Affairs Committee -- that was part of that in the state legislature because, once we cleaned it up, we've had clean and fair elections.

"In fact, I'm very proud that Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin is here today, because he's been running great elections in Louisiana. And we don't win every election. We have a sitting Democrat governor. We have a lot of Republicans that are elected too, by the way, but people -- when they go to the polls -- in record numbers recently in a lot of elections, which is a good thing, but they have confidence that the results that come in on election night are the will of the voters.

"And so when you look at some of the provisions of this bill, they have wide support across this country. The idea that you have to show a picture ID to vote is common sense in America. In fact, polling indicates about 80 percent of Americans support the idea that you require an ID to vote including, by the way, a strong majority of Democrats who support showing ID. People are used to showing ID for a lot of things. If they get on an airplane, they have to show an ID -- nobody complains about that.

"Let's go and strengthen the sanctity of the vote. Don't go mail ballots to people that have been off the rolls for years, that have died, that have moved to other states. We've seen it -- it's well documented.

"In this bill that Chairman Steil [and] all of his committee have brought forward is [a] really, really important step in the right direction of cleaning up our elections and ensuring that everybody who's legally eligible to vote gets that vote, and people who aren't legally eligible can't deny that vote and as he said, let's make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. This bill achieves that. We strongly support the ACE Act and look forward to bringing it to the House floor."

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