Freedom to Vote Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I so much appreciate the words of my colleague from Minnesota, who has brought the Rules Committee to bear in a maximum capacity to fight to defend the freedom to vote for all Americans.
When I was in high school, I had the opportunity to live in West Africa under a dictatorship as an exchange student. And in that country, the military dictatorship would exist until there was a new military coup, and then there would be another military dictatorship. And that happened time after time after time.
So, as a 16-year-old, I saw the contrast between a nation where citizens had no voice in the future of their country versus the United States of America, where the foundation of our Republic, the core vision of our Nation is that each citizen has the opportunity to participate, to fight to help shape the American dream, the path into the future, to the benefit of a better nation.
President Johnson noted that the ballot box is so essential that ``the vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised . . . for breaking down injustice.'' Really, that ballot box is the pulsating heart of our democracy.
President Lincoln, when he was speaking at Gettysburg--speaking that the soldiers who died there did not die in vain because they fought to preserve the vision of government of, by, and for the people, that it shall not perish from this Earth. Well, it is the vote that preserves the vision of government of, by, and for the people. It is free access to the ballot box.
Over the course of our history, we have sought to fulfill that vision through the 13th and 14th Amendments, through the 15th Amendment, through the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But here we find, at this moment in our history, the right to vote is under attack once again. Some 18 States have passed some 30 laws trying to target specific groups of individuals and prevent them from being able to vote. These strategies in State after State are to make it harder to vote and easier to cheat.
Well, I will tell you what this bill does that we are talking about today, the Freedom to Vote bill. It makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat. It takes on three key forms of corruption that are haunting our election system.
First, it takes on dark money--dark money unleashed by Citizens United that allows billionaires to buy elections around this country.
Do a poll of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents and ask ``Should we have this dark money, source unknown, haunting our election system, producing all of those attack ads, and you have no idea where they came from?'' and citizens of every political stripe will say ``Absolutely not.''
Dark money, the hidden manipulation of the elections by the powerful--buying these vast sets of television ads, trying to destroy the character of candidates in order to manipulate the outcome--should not exist. It is in the DNA of Americans that this is a corrupting force. Well, this bill takes on the dark money.
The second thing that it takes on is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is where districts are drawn to favor one political party over the other. Ask Americans across this country ``Is it right that politicians should choose their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians?'' and they will say ``No.'' Ask if they believe in the vision of equal representation as a key to a just society, and they will say yes. They want equal representation. Republicans say yes. Democrats say yes. Independents say yes.
This bill takes on gerrymandering and puts an end to it with national standards for redistricting.
Now, let's turn to the ballot box. I never thought I would live to see the day that we go into a time machine and return to before 1965, in which one of the two parties is determined to block targeted groups from voting--to target Black Americans from voting, Hispanic Americans from voting, low-income Americans from voting, college students from voting. This is completely un-American. This is racist. It is a past that we had proudly put behind us, but this bigoted past has arisen to haunt us once again in these some 30 laws in some 18 States, targeting specific groups of Americans.
This bill says that strategy of cheating on election day by trying to block targeted groups from voting will not stand. We will make it easier to register. That is what this bill does. We will make it easier to vote before election day to undermine those election-day shenanigans. We will have 15 days of early voting. We will have the opportunity for voting by mail. We will make sure that our I.D. laws are not used in a fashion to favor one party over the other. These are core protections against these strategies designed to disenfranchise Americans and manipulate the outcome of elections.
I will tell you what else this law does. It takes on election subversion. We have seen strategies of election subversion in many of those State laws. So this bill says: You know what. No, you cannot have frivolous challenges where one person stands at a poll and challenges the legitimacy of every single person who comes into that poll place in order to make it hard for people in a certain location to vote.
It protects election officials from improper removal. It protects election workers from intimidation and harassment. It preserves election records so they cannot be manipulated. It guarantees that we have paper ballots that can be recounted. It prevents observer interference in the elections. It makes sure that people in line, if something terrible should happen and those lines are long, will still be able to have access to water and food, which is a strategy that has been now employed by several States, to say: You know what. On election day, we are going to make sure targeted precincts have long lines, and then we are going to say you can't even get a sip of water from a friend in that line, in order to try to stop people from voting.
Wow--the lengths these Republican house, statehouse, and State senators and Governors are going to stop people from voting. We have seen the strategies in the past. We have seen eliminating the number of precinct voting locations to make it harder for targeted areas to vote. We have seen locating them in new locations to confuse people. We have seen false information put out about where the locations are to make it harder to vote. We have seen the understaffing of key places to create long lines. Well, early voting, vote-by-mail, and protections in this bill stop these efforts to cheat in elections across our country.
So we are defending that most powerful instrument ever devised by human beings for breaking down injustice with this Freedom to Vote bill. We are defending the right of every American to cast a ballot. We are fighting against the big three corruptions infesting, if you will, our election system across the country. This should be passed 100 to 0.
I invite my Republican colleagues to remember the oath they took to the Constitution and to remember that the right to vote is at the very heart of that Constitution and join us in these core protections and to pass the Freedom to Vote Act on the floor of the Senate.
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