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Floor Speech

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Mr. HUSTED. Madam President, I have been here for a little while this afternoon, this evening, and have listened to a lot of the concerns of my colleagues, and I believe I have something tonight that will provide some common ground that, hopefully, we can all support.

I come to this conversation having been twice elected and entrusted as the chief elections officer of the State of Ohio, as being elected their secretary of state. I oversaw elections: presidential elections in 2012 and 2016, as well as midterm elections in 2014 and 2018, and many primaries, local elections, special elections, ballot initiatives, on and on and on.

I know my election law. I know my election administration, and I believe Ohio is the gold standard for how to run an election. I made my mission clear in that role to make Ohio a place where it was easy to vote and hard to cheat.

And many other States do it right; many other States do it right. They have voter ID laws. They properly maintain the voter rolls. However, other States do not do that.

I enforced voter roll maintenance, the voter roll maintenance standards in all 88 counties, to make sure that no one could nefariously or accidentally cast a ballot, and this standard was upheld in the case before the U.S. Supreme Court of Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute.

And I can tell you, it is a chore to make sure that only legally registered citizens are on the voter rolls because there are millions of people in this country who can get driver's licenses, who get Social Security numbers, who are not citizens of the United States of America. They may be here on a visa, a green card, a refugee, someone here on a TPS--temporary protected status. They all get the things that you need to register to vote in many States.

And when you are in a swing State, you have lots of outside groups that just want to register everybody because they get paid more and more and more the more people they register, even if those people are not legally allowed to be on the voter rolls. It is an important responsibility.

I also launched an annual voter fraud and suppression report, which was a postmortem on each election cycle, and we found cases every election of fraud and attempted fraud, even with all those safeguards in place. It was rare, but it was real. It was out there.

And you may say: Well, what is the big deal? It is a few hundred here, a few hundred there. We had 200 elections during my tenure. When you add up the local elections that were decided by 1 vote or tied-- local elections, township trustees, political officials--every vote counts; every vote matters.

Ohio then implemented a required photo ID law at the polls, and with these reforms, there has been no evidence of voter suppression. In fact, with all of these measures in place, in the 2024 Presidential election, it produced the second highest turnout that we have had in the past four Presidential elections.

And it is not surprising that people don't find it hard to produce an ID when they come to vote because it happens in their lives every single day. I know, for me, in the last week, I have had to provide an ID to enter a government building, an ID to rent a car, an ID to stay at a hotel. But many other things we commonly do in life, whether that is someone going to the local store to buy alcohol or tobacco, you name it, lots of reasons that people have to supply IDs. They are very accustomed to doing it. They do it all the time.

So when they show up at the polls and ask for an ID, they already had it with them because they probably were already asked for it once that day.

And in Ohio--and I know other States do this and are perfectly capable of doing it--if you don't have an ID, the State of Ohio will get you one free of charge at the DMV.

So when we talk about the SAVE America Act, it is trying to solve a simple problem--at least the provision I am here to talk about tonight--that we need to make sure that we know who is coming to the polls to cast their vote because election integrity matters. But there are 14 States that do not have voter ID laws, even though 80 percent of Americans think it is a good idea. This is one of those issues that, whether you talk to Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, they say: Yes, photo ID makes sense. It is just kind of common sense that we would want to know who is voting when we cast a ballot to elect Presidents and Senators and Governors.

And, like I said, I have tried to listen. I heard my Democrat colleagues say that they don't oppose photo ID laws. I heard Senator Schumer say our objection as Democrats is not to a photo ID. I heard Senator Fetterman say he supports a photo ID law. And I guess if I can quote him:

If GOP wants real reform over a show vote--put out a clean, standalone bill, and I'm AYE.

Well, that is what I am doing tonight. The voter, under this legislation, could present a photo ID of any of the following: a State- issued driver's license that includes a photo and an expiration date, State ID that has a photo of the individual and an expiration date, a valid U.S. passport, a valid military ID, or a valid ID issued by a Tribal government that includes a photo of the individual and an expiration date.

Pretty simple. Not complicated. Easy to do. It is proven effective because many States already do it. We certainly do it in Ohio.

I will add that it is also easier to administer when you have a photo ID and you are an election official because we have our neighbors show up every 2 or 4 years to work at the polls. They might be young children, young adults. We know we let high school students participate in that in Ohio. It might be a senior citizen. It could be anybody that decides they are going to give of their day to go sit at the polls and check in voters.

When you have a photo ID, it is simple. You just look at it or you slide it through the card reader and the voter's information pops up and you know which precinct they are from, which ballot they have, and whether they are legally allowed to vote. Rather than trying to do it the old way, the bureaucratic way of having to look through poll books and making every poll worker who works there once every 2 or 4 years become a signature-reading expert to try to determine whether or not somebody is truly allowed to vote in that precinct and they are who they say they are.

So I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle realize or really do support a photo ID law because this legislation is the simple, easy, proven way to do it.

So showing a photo ID is common sense. The American people support it by an 80-20 margin. And as I have been saying for more than a decade and a half, it is possible to make it both easy to vote and hard to cheat, and we should make that a national standard with the photo ID law that is easy to implement and is proven effective.

Passing voter ID requirements is common sense and passing this provision that I offer tonight as part of the SAVE America Act is right for election integrity and it is the right thing to do for voter confidence and I urge a ``yes'' vote.

4155, which is at the desk; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

And I recognize, Madam President, that I have some colleagues here that may want to offer something.

Madam President, let me withdraw that request and allow my colleagues to speak.

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Mr. HUSTED. 4155, which is at the desk; further, that the bill be read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider is considered made and laid upon the table.

There were a lot of points made about citizenship. The amendment that I am proposing has nothing to do with citizenship; it has to do with photo ID--five simple ways that have been proven successful in many States to determine if the person showing up to vote is, indeed, the person who is registered to vote. It is that simple. Five. Five forms of identification that everyone has access to. This particular amendment is not about citizenship; it is about photo ID.

Secondly, I want to address the issue about protecting the secrecy of the ballot.

Let me also say that there are no birth certificate requirements in this particular amendment I have.

Then I want to talk about the secrecy of the ballot. Let me explain the administration of how elections officials make sure the ballot that is being mailed in is, indeed, a legitimate vote.

There are two envelopes. The first envelope is the security envelope. That envelope determines if the individual is eligible, in which they could put their--inside that envelope put their copy of their photo ID or their Social Security number on the form you would have them fill out.

The second envelope contains the actual ballot. What happens once that ballot is received is that two elections officials in the State of Ohio--one Republican and one Democrat--look at it, they validate the integrity of the envelope that was received with the ballot, and then remove that, separate all the identification over here, and put the secure ballot that has been validated as legal into another box, which is then loaded in the machines and later counted on election night.

The secrecy of the vote is in no way jeopardized by that process. How do I know? We have been using it for years. It has never been a problem, and we have a Democrat and a Republican right there with their eyes on it making sure that happens.

Now, to the substance of the gentleman's amendment, there are many reasons that I could object to this, but I will take one, because this is the Freedom to Vote by Mail Act. It is a very large amendment in which it authorizes unsolicited mail-in ballots--let me repeat: unsolicited mail-in ballots--meaning I didn't ask for it; you just sent me a ballot.

Why is this wrong? I will give you a couple of examples.

In Wood County, where Bowling Green State University is in Ohio, at one point in time, we had more registered voters than there were people in the county.

You say: How could that happen?

Because Bowling Green State University is there, and every 4 years when you are a swing State, people really, really try to get every single student to register to vote on that campus. So over years, according to the National Voting Rights Act, you cannot remove somebody for being an inactive voter, meaning just because I didn't show up and vote, I am on the voter rolls; you can't remove me.

Well, I want to just give you a reason why they might still be on the rolls--because when they graduate from college, they don't think to call the Wood County Board of Elections and remove themselves from the rolls; they just stay on there.

According to Federal law, you just can't remove them for being inactive for at least 6 years, and you have to go through a series of verifications, which is what I did in Ohio and was part and parcel to the Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a process that was approved.

So in States that don't do that, which there are many that don't, what you have are people that may attend the University of Oregon; they may be from Columbus, OH; they may graduate from college and live in an apartment on campus; and when they move back to Ohio, you wouldn't know the difference. They are still on the rolls, and you are sending them a ballot--and they are not even legally allowed to vote in that State-- because you can't remove them from the rolls without going through a 6- year process. That is the Federal law.

That is why we have so many people--so many ballots in States that do unsolicited absentee balloting with ballots floating around out there, and they are not supposed to be sent. The person they are being sent to is not legally allowed to vote because they may very well be registered in another State, and you wouldn't even know it.

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