Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues in standing up to protect Americans' constitutional right to vote and to fight back against this administration's most recent attack on access to the ballot box.

Instead of making the case to Americans about policies and what you want to do and why you think it is important to have say--the tariffs that in my State are wreaking havoc for our farmers with more yet to come--this legislation would actually be an end-around of the voting process.

This legislation would make it hard for a whole bunch of American citizens to vote, which appears to be the endgame, given what the President has said about it. By his own admission, he said that passing this bill ``will guarantee the midterms.''

That is not my quote. It is an exact quote by the President of the United States.

The SAVE America Act will kick American citizens off State voter rolls. And how is this happening?

Well, this is a complete invasion of the privacy of voters. It makes secretaries of state give the voter rolls--the voter information, the voter data--to the Department of Homeland Security, as in the same Agency that brought us ICE, and then run that information through some kind of DOGE-like system that is somehow going to spit back out to the States which voters they should kick off the voter rolls.

Then the bill also creates the bureaucratic hurdles that make it complicated and costly for American citizens to register to vote or change their registration, particularly for the 69 million women who have chosen to change their name when they got married. Why should they be penalized?

And millions of American citizens don't have the specific document required by this bill to prove citizenship because this bill won't allow for driver's licenses anymore. You have got to produce other documents like a passport or a birth certificate.

More than half of Americans don't have passports, and they cost at least $165 to get. Birth certificates can cost $30. In my State they are $24. And they can take tons of in-person time to obtain.

For anyone that has ever had that experience, maybe for some other purpose that you have to get your birth certificate, it is not always as easy as people think.

And this bill also requires people to register to vote in person at their election offices, effectively ending proven and popular methods of registration used by millions of Americans in Democratic- and Republican-led States all across the country, like online and mail-in registration.

This would be a significant barrier for registration for millions of voters, especially for people in rural areas who have to drive hours to get that registration completed now. Rural Americans in many places would be forced to travel an average of about 4 hours round trip, and some voters in Alaska and Hawaii would be forced to take a flight just to register in person.

This bill creates chaos. Maybe that is not the motivation of some of my colleagues, but I do believe it is the motivation of the President, who basically said:

It will guarantee the midterms.

It is designed to make it harder for American citizens--certain American citizens--to vote. It is designed to undermine mail-in voting and lay the groundwork for this obsession that the President seems to have with banning mail-in voting, while in some States, it is actually the prevailing way that people vote, including a number of red States, as the Presiding Officer is aware.

Because the administration can read the polls, they see that there is major concern in America with high costs. So instead of maybe passing a different bill, which we could call the Save Americans Money Act, which would be doing something about these gas prices when we know it has happened--now gas prices are up $30 or $40 a barrel, $30 to $40 a barrel, and every $10 in increase for a barrel of oil is a $450-a-year increase for the average American family. For the second time ever, the average price of diesel has reached $5 per gallon. Look at what is happening with groceries. Electricity prices were up an average of $110 last year on Americans' bills. Healthcare costs continue to skyrocket.

There are things we can do. We have a bipartisan housing bill we just passed in the Senate that needs to get passed in the House. We have some permitting bills. I was long a supporter of Senator Manchin's proposal on permitting. We could get that done. We should be adding energy to the grid. This idea that somehow we are going to think that North Dakota wind is bad in a pretty red State and then ban grants that would have brought that wind, which was good for North Dakota and Minnesota, to Minnesota with a power company in northern Minnesota--that is one of the grants that had gotten singled out and I think has just recently gotten released.

All that stuff are things that we could do to help Americans with their costs. So we should be working on the Save Americans Money Act instead of this.

So I urge my Republican colleagues to change course and stand with us and stand up for the fundamental right to vote. That always used to be bipartisan.

The idea that you are going to make all these people reregister or register with an expensive passport or birth certificate, that they can no longer use their driver's license, that their private voter data is sent to Homeland Security to go through some Elon Musk-designed computer system, is not what people want in this country right now.

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