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Floor Speech
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Mrs. GILLIBRAND. Mr. President, I rise today to address the merits of this bill, per my colleague's request.
I rise to speak out against President Trump's un-American efforts to keep millions of eligible voters from the ballot box. The President is more focused on preventing Americans from voting than in lowering prices for working families who are suffering right now because of his economy and because of Trump's tariffs.
Make no mistake, the SAVE America Act is not about preventing voter fraud. It is a voter suppression bill designed to silence American voters. This legislation would virtually eliminate voter registration methods that 90 percent of Americans rely on. That includes mail-in registration, online registration, voter registration drives, and automatic registration at the DMV.
It would also require citizens to present documents like a passport or a birth certificate in person while registering to vote--and not just when they register for the first time. Every time someone moves or if a woman changes her name when she gets married or if a person wants to update their political party affiliation, they have to go back to the election office in person to reregister with those specific documents.
Up to half of all active registered voters--that is 100 million Americans--register or reregister to vote every Federal election cycle. While coming up with these documents may sound easy, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens, including over 5 million New Yorkers, do not have a valid passport, and getting one for the first time costs $165 and takes several weeks, if not months. On top of that, nearly 70 million women who have taken their spouses' names do not have birth certificates that match their new legal married names.
The newest version of this bill also ends mail-in and absentee voting, with very limited exceptions, putting up a massive barrier to people's ability to vote if they work during the day or otherwise can't make it to the polls in person. That means, in practice, this legislation would disenfranchise millions of American voters.
It wouldn't just make it harder for new voters to register or for registered voters to change their information or for people to actually vote. The SAVE America Act would also force States to submit voter data to the Department of Homeland Security under the guise of verifying voter citizenship status. But here is the catch: Registered voters who are flagged by DHS, which has a history of misidentifying U.S. citizens as ineligible to vote, would then have to prove their citizenship or be removed from the voter rolls. That means that registered voters could be purged from the rolls, then face the additional burden of confirming their citizenship in person with an accurate passport or birth certificate. That is an extraordinary burden to put on working Americans who are just trying to exercise their right to vote. It is unacceptable.
Let me just put a finer point on this. If you take out your wallet and find your identification, it is going to be a driver's license. It is going to be an insurance card. It is going to be your military ID. None of those pieces of identification are valid. So the process that we have today for showing who you are is not valid under this bill.
The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy. It is the purist expression of what it means to be an American. From the founding of this Nation to the hard-won struggles of the civil rights movement, generations of Americans have fought, marched, and died to guarantee that every citizen has a voice in their government. That sacred promise should never be weakened, suppressed, or denied, but that is exactly what is happening right now.
So, as we prepare to vote for this legislation, I ask you all to consider what this means for your constituents.
Think about the servicemembers who have to move every few years when they get a new base assignment and would have to go through this onerous process of reregistering in person over and over again.
Think about those in the rural communities in your State, where it might take hours to get to the location where they can appear in person to confirm their citizenship to maintain their registration.
Think about the seniors and the people with disabilities who are homebound and who rely on mail-in and online registration to make their voices heard.
Think about the nearly 70 million women, like me, who have taken their husbands' last names. The SAVE America Act would effectively block us from voting if you don't have a passport or didn't go to get a new birth certificate with your married name on it.
All of these American citizens would be disenfranchised by the SAVE America Act.
Make no mistake, this bill is not about preventing election fraud. If it were, I would be for it. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in our elections, and numerous studies have confirmed that voting by noncitizens is extremely rare. Instead, this bill is a poorly concealed effort by President Trump to consolidate his own power and strip Americans of their constitutional rights.
The President himself said that, by passing the SAVE America Act, the GOP will ``never lose a race for 50 years.''
What do you think President Trump meant by that?
It is a blatant admission that this legislation is designed to subvert the will of the American people to keep President Trump's allies in power. We will not let them get away with that.
Whether you live in a rural town or in a major city, whether you vote red or whether you vote blue, whether you are old or whether you are young, whether you are rich or whether you are poor, your vote is your voice, and your voice deserves to be heard.
Here in Congress, we have a duty to protect and strengthen the right to vote for all Americans. This legislation does the opposite. I urge my colleagues to vote no on the SAVE America Act.
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