Unanimous Consent Request--S. 4033

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I thank you. I thank Senator Klobuchar. I thank Senator Coons, an absolutely invaluable member of this alliance, ensuring that we are going to be able to get the resources for this.

My mother would say, if she looked around, ``Dear, you're running with the right crowd.'' It is a pleasure to be able to team up with both of you.

I want to put this in some kind of context to begin because my colleagues have all done such a good job. I also got a chance to listen to the Senator from Virginia, Senator Warner. He and I serve on the Intelligence Committee. I can't get into classified information, but certainly we are very much aware of some of the challenges to protecting the integrity of the votes of our citizens from a national security standpoint.

I just want to start with a kind of basic, commonsense proposition. When you do something like making sure, in 2020, that citizens don't have to have a notary to vote, what you are doing is just common sense, and that is what expanded in-person voting is all about. That is what you do when you support voters with disabilities. That is what you do when you make it easier for communities where there are people of modest income, communities of color, to vote.

It has been a pleasure to be able to work with Senator Klobuchar in particular, who is passionately committed to adding those kinds of priorities.

I would only say that when you add these kinds of commonsense steps to enhance the ability of Americans to vote safely, only Donald Trump and Majority Leader McConnell could call it a liberal conspiracy. This is just basic common sense in government 101.

I am particularly concerned because all of us know what is coming. In other words, we have been out here talking about these priorities now for months. We saw it in Wisconsin. We saw it in Georgia. We now know what is coming. If anything, we get additional news every day about what the challenge is.

I don't know whether anybody has touched on it this afternoon, but just today, Dr. Tony Fauci said he would not be surprised to soon see 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day.

The Presiding Officer of the Senate is a physician, and he knows this well. He comes from a State that has faced a lot of challenges. Who are the people who are most vulnerable? It is seniors. It is people who are over the age of 60.

What I would say to my colleagues is, when I introduced the first bill to vote by mail--and that was a full 20 years ago--to give everybody in America the chance to vote the Oregon way--they wouldn't have to vote the Oregon way, but they would all have a chance to vote by mail, a ballot. We knew that this would be a big breakthrough in terms of our special system of government. Our military has always looked to innovative ways to make sure that our courageous men and women in uniform would have a chance to be counted in every election. We knew 20 years ago that vote-by-mail would be an important innovation because we had been doing it for years and years in Oregon.

All the arguments that have been thrown out recently--these arguments about fraud--our late secretary of state, Dennis Richardson, who was very conservative, before he passed--he passed shortly after Donald Trump took office--he wrote the President, Donald Trump, and said: This fraud issue is nonexistent in Oregon. Every election, there are virtually no instances, but a lot of people believe they got a chance to be counted, and they got a chance to do it in a way that was convenient for them.

There are a lot of challenges, certainly, today with the coronavirus. What we do with vote-by-mail, as my colleagues have been talking about, is we need to make it easier to empower voters to vote the way they would like to be able to vote--safely and at home.

Right now, voters are worried about infection. Sixty-six percent recently said they were concerned about going to polling places--and for good reason.

We just had our primary in Oregon, and nobody had to worry about infection in the State of Oregon. We voted safely in the middle of a pandemic--no long lines, no interactions with older people and multiple poll workers, often putting several people at risk of the coronavirus, not just one person. Yes, if you have the possibility of touching a machine used by hundreds of people, there is certainly reason to be worried. Since 66 percent of poll workers are over the age of 60, many of them are staying home to avoid getting sick.

I think my colleagues on the other side of the Chamber know at least some of what I have said this afternoon. I believe they know what is coming this fall because we have already seen a kind of snapshot of it over the last couple of months in terms of the challenge of voting during the era of the coronavirus.

In 2016, we saw what happened when a foreign power tried to interfere with our election. The concerns of 2016 are now magnified in 2020. I put forward the Resilient Elections During Quarantines and Natural Disasters Act, and I would like to think we have been trying to get the facts out to Senators on both sides of the aisle for years now.

It was a pleasure to team up with Senator Klobuchar on the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act and with Senator Coons, as he was our point person in securing the funds that are a prerequisite to doing this job right. In other words, you have to have funds, and you have to have the reforms.

We don't really think that it is a revolutionary proposition that what you ought to do is everything possible to make sure that every eligible American can vote safely in a pandemic.

Nobody I know in this Chamber is offering the proposition that the Federal Government should just run elections. What we are trying to do is give States and local governments clear guidance about the best way to keep elections running during the pandemic and the resources in order to use that guidance, as Senator Klobuchar and I have talked about--two sides of the same coin--not running the election but giving good facts and clear guidance about how to prevent the pandemic and the dollars to make it possible to carry it out.

If a million members of the military, five U.S. States, and tens of millions of Americans across the country can vote by mail every election, then every voter ought to be able to vote by mail.

It is now online, and I hope my colleagues will look at the wonderful discussions ``60 Minutes'' had about vote-by-mail in Oregon just a couple of days ago with our secretary of state, Bev Clarno. She, too, is a Republican. There are real bipartisan roots on this.

I am the first U.S. Senator ever to be elected by mail. I am a Democrat. The second U.S. Senator to be elected by mail, our former colleague Gordon Smith, was a Republican. You see Democrats, and you see Republicans. You watch ``60 Minutes.'' You hear from our secretary of state, who is a longtime Republican. You heard what I had to say about the late Dennis Richardson, who I would venture to say was just about as conservative as any Member of the Republican caucus. We are going to keep doing everything we can to get the facts out and make sure that people understand these arguments about, for example, fraud. We have to say, so people really see how strongly we feel about it.

A few years ago, a poll worker tampered with two ballots. We put that person in jail for 90 days and fined him $13,000, and they were barred from ever working in an election again. That is the way to show you are serious about making sure you are sending a strong message about the integrity of every person's vote, addressing the safety questions, and avoiding the proliferation of insecure, overpriced electronic election equipment--something that the voting machine lobby has been pedaling for years and years. Those, again, are not partisan kinds of positions; they are just plain common sense.

I realize that Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are going to keep doing everything they can to block vote-by-mail on legislation, but I believe that when we really get into negotiating the nuts and bolts of the coronavirus package in the Senate when we come back, I believe, particularly because Senators are going to be home, they are going to hear from voters, and voters are going to say: Don't put our health at risk. Give us the ability to vote in a safe way.

That is what we have tried to do.

I will just say to my colleagues, there really is no plan B. The choice is either vote by mail or through the expanded options that we are offering in our bill, or huge numbers of Americans will not be able to vote at all.

We are better than this, and it is time for Senators to look again.

As I said, there is no plan B here, colleagues. The choice is to take advantage of our options for citizens to be able to vote safely, or huge numbers of Americans will not be able to vote at all.

I think, to close for our side, the lead sponsor, the senior Democrat in the Rules Committee, may have something else to say. As a Senator who has worked on this, as I say, for two full decades, I knew that we were going to face challenges along the way. Back when we started, it was kind of a debate among political scientists. Now it is fundamentally a question of keeping our citizens safe as they exercise the franchise. I think it is very fitting that Senator Klobuchar close for our side

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