Terminating the National Emergency Declared to Impose Global Tariffs

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I, too, am here on the floor today to oppose the SAVE Act.

Today, Americans register to vote in a variety of ways, typically set by each State in this country, but Federal law requires that Americans attest to citizenship under penalty of perjury.

In Colorado, you can register online; you can register in person; you can register through the mail. It can be as easy as providing your Social Security number and signature, which every American has, through the secretary of state's website.

Alternatively, the SAVE Act would change that by requiring that all American citizens, whether registering for the first time or updating their registration, to present proof of citizenship in person, largely in the form of a passport or a birth certificate. In other words, government issued driver's licenses and military and Tribal identifications would not satisfy the bill's requirements.

The SAVE Act would severely restrict online voter registration and mail-in registration and eliminate voter registration drives altogether. It would make it harder or even impossible for up to 69 million married American women who have changed their names, because their last name doesn't match the one on their birth certificate.

Meanwhile, half of Americans don't even have a passport. How are they going to register under this law? They can't.

Over 60 million Americans who live in rural areas--now they are going to have to drive miles and miles and miles, hours out of their way, to stand in line at a local election agency.

The SAVE Act does nothing to make it easier to cast a ballot; it only succeeds in making it harder for Americans to register to vote and to exercise their rights.

This is not theoretical. Kansas tried to implement its own State- level SAVE Act in 2013, with disastrous results. The law blocked over 30,000 potential registrants in just 2 years--about 12 percent of all voter registrations during the period. State officials acknowledged in court that over 99 percent of affected voters were U.S. citizens.

Now, even Kansas's Republican secretary of state, who championed the bill when he was a State legislator, has warned against it, saying:

It didn't work out so well.

I would say so. About 12 percent of the people who tried to register couldn't.

Compare those 30,000 Kansans who attempted to register and were denied to the 30 people--30 people--the 30 noncitizens who reportedly voted in the 2016 election nationwide. That is about 0.0001 percent of all votes cast.

If there ever was one, this is a solution in search of a problem, and the only solution doesn't even work. It only makes it harder for law- abiding Americans to register to vote or patriotic Americans to register to vote.

Perhaps it would be better if this bill were modeled after the system that we have in Colorado.

We have set the gold standard in my State. It is a system that actually encourages people to vote in a fraud-free system. In Colorado, we are the first State in America to complete a risk-limiting audit, the gold standard for verifying the integrity of election results to begin with, and it entails counting and comparing a representative sample of ballots to the reported result.

To prevent hacking, none of our voting machines are attached to the internet. We require county clerks to use two-factor authentication to access voter databases.

And once a vote is cast, a bipartisan team of election judges in each county checks every signature against the copy in the database for any discrepancies.

All election officials and judges with access to the tabulation process must pass a Colorado Bureau of Investigation background check. Colorado has spent years implementing top-tier cyber security measures and audits to prevent hackers from interfering with our electoral process.

We have one of the most secure election systems of any State in the country, and because Coloradans have trust in our gold standard system, we have some of the highest voter turnout in America. That is the model we should be using across the country, in my view. Instead of wasting time and taxpayer dollars on the SAVE Act, Congress should be implementing Colorado's practices all across the country.

Thank you very much for his leadership in bringing the Nation's attention to this issue today.

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