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Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. But just minutes ago, another colleague from Alaska was on this floor laying out the enormous difficulties that this very proposal would create, disenfranchising a tremendous number of people across her State.

Now, this is part of a larger bill that has the goal of stopping citizens from voting. It is targeted directly to making it very difficult for women to vote. It would proceed to make it very difficult for students to vote. It would make it very difficult for Tribal members to vote.

My colleague from Ohio mentioned the phrase: The goal is to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. But, in fact, it is all about making it hard to vote. This broader bill is all about creating a national voter registration database that the administration has the ability to purge. They can then ding people, give them a little ping, if you will, and say: We stripped your name out. Try to go reregister. But, in fact, they can do that right before the election.

And it has already been laid out. You can't even register to vote under this broader law with your birth certificate. No, you have to have a birth certificate and something else.

They do say you can register to vote with just your passport, but that brings in a very expensive enterprise, and it takes 6 months to do that.

But let's focus on this particular piece. This measure before us proceeds to destroy the secret ballot. In 2024, 48 million citizens voted by mail. That includes the State of Utah that my good friend was just speaking from and representing. It includes the State of Oregon.

Now, those 48 million folks are told: You have to tell the world how you are voting because you have to put a copy of your birth certificate or your driver's license in with your ballot. So when they open your secret ballot, your name is inside there with the same document of how you voted.

Well, that is pretty troubling, this effort to destroy the secrecy of the ballot for 48 million Americans.

Now, my colleague from Ohio has a lot of studies and experience that I will acknowledge, and I am not familiar with all of the studies that he has conducted, but I am familiar with the study from the good State of Utah, an examination of 2 million voters.

That examination, done by his State government, found that there was 1 person registered who should not have been registered out of those 2 million people, but that person had never voted. So the number for amount of fraud was zero out of 2 million.

I am not sure if Ohio could even match that incredible level of integrity that Utah achieved to be able to have an audit that shows that zero people that weren't qualified to vote voted.

Oregon had a study that covered 20 years of voting--20 years. That is a long period of time. They found cases that were, if you will, potentially a problem in less than one out of a million. I am not sure Ohio could match that either, because the system of voting by mail has a lot more integrity than the system of voting at the polls.

You see, voting at the polls introduces so much opportunity for shenanigans. The people involved who don't want a particular community to vote--well, they move the precinct locations between elections, so people go to the wrong place. They put the precinct election places where there is no place to park--a deliberate effort to disenfranchise individuals. They proceed to put in machines that don't work in order to create long lines. Others have put out false information about the location and false information about the date.

This is a whole series of proven strategies to corrupt elections on election day. And that is why President Trump wants to shut down vote- by-mail--because it is easy to manipulate and corrupt the election on election day using these systems that have been well studied and well practiced in many jurisdictions.

Well, I value integrity, and Utah and Oregon have shown me that type of integrity. In fact, Utah's Lieutenant Governor--I might mention that he shares the party that is across the aisle from me--he noted that this bill would violate the State election law, which guarantees a secret ballot.

An assault on the secret ballot, an effort to be able to manipulate election day in a corrupt manner, an effort to rig the November election--that is what we are talking about right here.

This is absolutely wrong because we should be down here defending the high-integrity system of vote-by-mail, not trying to corrupt its secrecy or trying to stop it altogether.

Thus, Madam President, I ask that the Senator modify his request and take my amendment at the desk to be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Yes. And I would guess a study of Ohio would find that it is probably not as good as Oregon and probably not as good as Utah. The reason why is because our States take so seriously integrity in the voting process. That is why these surveys show that the issue of fraud is either zero or vanishingly small--so vanishingly rare, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning.

This bill that they are presenting, this broader bill--it is not to address fraud; it is to make it very hard for targeted groups in America to vote and to make it impossible, in the broader bill, to vote by mail because they want you to have to vote in a system that can be manipulated.

I did notice he didn't address a single one of the six ways I noted that voting at the polls is often manipulated.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Back in 2022, Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking minors as Jeffrey Epstein's coconspirator in their horrific crimes against women and girls. She was a key person in the grooming, the abuse, and the rape of a vast number of young girls.

Bureau of Prison policy requires that sex offenders be housed in at least low security prisons. To explain, there are high security, medium security, low security, and then way down at the bottom--you know, think hotels--there is this minimum security.

Prison policy requires that minimum security is unacceptable for people who have been sex offenders--people like Ghislaine Maxwell--but then, in July of 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche spent 2 days meeting with her in conversations that are completely opaque to everyone else in America, and suddenly, after these 2 days of conversation in which who knows what was promised, she was transferred to a minimum facility in Bryan, TX--otherwise known as Club Fed.

Now, in this minimum security facility, there is an athletic field, there are extracurricular activities, there is vocational training and access to service dogs. I guess that is pretty important to me because I love dogs, and I would love, if ever I was incarcerated, to have access to a dog. Hopefully, I will never be incarcerated.

On top of all this was a set of special treatments that she received after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had her transferred to ``Club Fed.'' What kinds of special treatment did she get? Well, her meals were customized and prepared by Federal prison camp staff and then personally delivered to her cell by Federal employees.

When she wanted to arrange a private meeting with visitors, the warden personally arranged it for her. The warden, the head of the prison, personally was her personal assistant. And then she provided a special cordoned-off area for the visitors to arrive and an assortment of snacks and refreshments for her guests. Does that sound like prison to you? The special assistant, the head of the prison, arranges snacks and refreshments. It sounds more like a congressional reception.

Her guests were permitted to bring computers, an unprecedented action approved by the warden specifically for Ms. Maxwell. When Ms. Maxwell wanted to review and edit documents quickly, she was allowed to use the warden, Tanisha Hall, as her personal secretary and administrative assistant. Ms. Maxwell's correspondents would email documents directly to the warden, who would then provide them and deliver them to Ms. Maxwell, who could then review them and edit them and provide them back to the warden, who would then scan them and provide them back to the original sender.

For other inmates, even at this minimum security prison, simple mail can take weeks to arrive and is frequently lost.

An inmate who trains puppies to become service dogs was instructed to provide one of these puppies to Ms. Maxwell so she could play with the puppy, even though neither inmates nor staff are ordinarily allowed to play with the dogs in training.

And when she wanted to go to the prison exercise area, she was personally escorted there after hours--that is, after normal hours--by prison guards so she could work out all by herself and enjoy recreation time in the staff-only areas.

Folks, what happened in those 2 days when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche went down and had all these private conversations--and, by the way, the type of conversations that are never held in that fashion by a Deputy Attorney General? Only him, with her. And now the head of a prison is her personal assistant, and she gets to use the staff area for her personal recreation. And she gets her puppy time, and she gets her meals prepared and hand delivered.

Folks, ``Club Fed,'' for a woman who facilitated the grooming, the abuse, and the rape of untold numbers of young women. This, my friends, is absolutely wrong. It is a slap in the face to every victim. The victims may not even be able to live in the way that she is living in this minimum security prison with the warden as her personal assistant. And so I think we can all agree on that.

So I ask for the Sex Offender Security Classification Integrity Act-- that the Senate proceed to immediate consideration of the bill that is at the desk. And it would ensure that a sex offender who under prison policy cannot be put in a minimum security facility could not be put into that minimum security facility the way she has.

Madam President, so I ask that the bill be considered read three times and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I will just note, once again, the failure to completely address the point that this bill is targeted at stopping students from voting, stopping Tribal members from voting, and that the broader bill from which it is derived is aimed at ending vote- by-mail altogether and taking away the secrecy of the ballot for 48 million people across America.

The fact that none of those points were covered speaks for itself.

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