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Floor Speech

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Mr. PETERS. Mr. President, the right to vote is the very bedrock of our American democracy. Two hundred fifty years ago, our Founders set out to create a nation governed by the people. At the time, they were renouncing a monarch who they called a tyrant for his overreaching actions.

The new government the Founders created in response, which has endured for 2\1/2\ centuries, was built upon entirely enshrining the fundamental principle that power lies with the people, and they exercised that power to hold their leaders accountable through their vote.

Two weeks ago, President Trump signed a sweeping and unconstitutional Executive order that would place the most significant restrictions to the right to vote in recent memory. There is no question this order is an attack on the right to vote, and it goes against the very heart of the free and fair elections that make our Nation a strong democratic Republic.

To preserve the power of the people to determine who their leaders are, our Constitution gives States the power to conduct elections. There is no authority for the President or the executive branch to make sweeping changes to our elections. The Founders designed it that way precisely to ensure that no single leader--especially one as powerful as a President--could hold sway over the outcome of those elections.

To be clear, in our country, the voters choose their leaders. Leaders do not have the power to choose their voters. But that is exactly--that is exactly--what President Trump is trying to do with his Executive order and what our Republican colleagues are trying to do by passing the SAVE Act.

Under this Executive order, President Trump is illegally co-opting the Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that he can pick and choose who gets to vote. It is all done under the guise of protecting the security of our elections, under the guise that the 2020 election was stolen.

Well, Mr. President, the facts simply do not back that up. In fact, there is no evidence--no evidence--that election fraud or noncitizen voting is a widespread problem in our elections. And in the very few cases that we have, they are effectively prosecuted, and they should be.

But the President and his allies want to use the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to create a new ``State Citizenship List'' that will determine who is eligible to vote in our election. Every State already determines whether people who register are actually eligible to vote.

To ask Federal Agencies that have no election administration responsibilities to do this is not only against the law, it risks removing eligible voters from the voter rolls. The Department of Homeland Security has already admitted that the Federal data sources that would be used to compile these new State Citizenship Lists, such as the outdated Social Security records, are absolutely riddled with inaccuracies. If that data is applied to voting, it risks American citizens being incorrectly purged from voter rolls and denied their constitutional right to vote.

The President's Executive order also weaponizes the Postal Service. It forces them to play a key role in elections as a regulator of absentee ballots.

The reason the Postal Service is one of our Nation's most trusted institutions is because it is completely neutral. In fact, Congress intentionally created the Postal Service to be an independent establishment and gave the postal power to the Board of Governors. The Postal Service doesn't care which politicians you may support. Its only priority is to deliver the mail to every community in the country.

The President is now trying to corrupt--trying to corrupt--this mission. If the President is successful in forcing the Postal Service to play a role in running elections, he will completely erode the trust of this storied institution.

What is truly crazy about the President's Executive order is that the Postal Service regularly takes extraordinary measures to ensure that election mail is actually delivered on time regardless of partisan politics. In fact, mail-in voting is a safe and secure way for voters to participate in our democracy. Millions of Americans, including President Trump, use this method to exercise their right to vote. And the Postal Service record stands for itself. Last election, they delivered over 99 million ballots, and 97 percent were delivered within just 3 days.

American elections have a long history of being free, fair, and secure, and vote-by-mail is a key part of ensuring that more Americans can participate in our democracy.

The President's Executive order and the SAVE Act Republicans are trying to pass through Congress are basically nothing more than an effort to undermine the security and the integrity of our electoral process.

I urge my colleagues and every American to stand up to this illegal power grab and help protect the core values that have always made our Nation great.

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