Christopher Dodd

Mr. DODD

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, that will be the business for this evening. Actually, we completed some work. We had about five amendments adopted in the last 4\1/2\ hours. I thank, again, the Senator from New York. Tomorrow morning, we may get to the bill around 10:15. I have been told that if we can get some agreement, maybe tomorrow, on final passage at a decent hour late tomorrow afternoon, early tomorrow evening--I don't know if that is possible or not--it may be possible for us to complete the business of the Senate by tomorrow. That is obviously subject to the work of the two leaders. At least there is a good possibility. I know that will be warm news to those who would like to get back to their respective States earlier rather than later. I can't help but note the smile of the Presiding Officer with that news. I thank my colleague from Kentucky for his help today in working through this. There will be a series of other amendments, people coming forward with ideas. We want to accommodate everybody we can, realizing that, as we said at the outset, this is new ground we are breaking in many areas. We are very sensitive and conscious of the State and local involvement in this process. We want to accommodate States and localities to the maximum extent possible as we try to become a better partner in the conduct of elections. We are trying to do work that is sometimes a little confusing, but I think we have done a pretty good job so far. I am hopeful tomorrow we can resolve these other amendments. My final plea is to Members: Please, there are more and more amendments. Some of them, I am told, are just colloquies. Some Members just want to offer the amendment and withdraw it and discuss their idea. I urge Members, please, if you are interested in doing that, come over first thing in the morning so we can get to the amendments that may require votes because we can't resolve them. We will have to just leave them up to the Members to decide whether or not they want to include them in the bill or not. I urge Members to come over.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I commend the Senator from New York. He has been a great help on this bill, generally speaking. These amendments not only will be important for New York but, as he has talked about them, there are other States as well that will appreciate the contribution the Senator from New York has made in these two proposals. I am in favor of both of these amendments. I just mention this to the Senator from New York. We are going to be looking at what the cost effect is of slipping in that reregistration form. It may not be much at all. I know the Senator from New York would probably want to know the answer to that as well. In the meantime, I will accept the amendment and take a look at that. I congratulate him on the amendments.

Mr. DODD. I am happy to yield.

Mr. DODD. I will defer to my colleague from Washington to take a few minutes, if she would like, and describe what this amendment is and what it does. I am informed by my friend from Kentucky that this is an amendment to which we can agree. The staffs have worked on this amendment. But why doesn't the Senator from Washington take a few minutes. I am glad we could work this out with her and others in her State.

Mr. DODD. I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, on behalf of myself and the distinguished Senators from Washington, Ms. Cantwell and Mrs. Murray, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senate amendment No. 2688, the bipartisan substitute, be agreed to; that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table; that the bill as thus amended be considered as original text for the purpose of further amendment, and provide further that no points of order are waived by this agreement.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, in a moment, I am going to share with my colleagues some endorsements of the underlying substitute bill, the Dodd-McConnell bill, along with others who are cosponsors of the substitute. There are numerous cosponsors of this bill, and I will submit momentarily the list of all those among our colleagues who are cosponsoring this legislation. Secondly, I will submit a list of various organizations such as the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, and a lot of other groups that are endorsing the bill as well, and I will submit for the Record letters that these organizations have offered on behalf of this legislation. The National Civil Rights Coalition is listing this as their No. 1 legislative priority this session of Congress. I will not read them all, but the following organizations have endorsed the Dodd-McConnell bipartisan compromise on election reform and urge the Senate to act on it: AFL-CIO, the NAACP, the Carter-Ford Commission, Public Citizen, American Association of People with Disabilities, National Federation of the Blind, the United States Cerebral Palsy Associations, People for the American Way, the League of Women Voters, the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Laborers' International Union of North America, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Common Cause, and a variety of Secretaries of State, both Democrats and Republicans, not all of them but some have specifically sent letters endorsing the legislation. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that some letters expressing why they think this bill is worthy of their support be printed in the Record.

Mr. DODD. I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, if there is no further debate, I ask that we vote on the amendment.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I don't know of any reason why we can't accept the amendment. I commend both my colleagues. I know this was offered earlier in the Armed Services Committee, and for reasons that the Senator from Colorado may be more aware of as a member of the committee, getting rid of what they considered to be extraneous amendments may have been the rationale. But I think our colleagues pointed out good rationale as to why it is worthwhile. In fact, the basic thrust of this bill that Senator McConnell and I are trying to address is why the two friends offered this amendment; that it ought to be easier to cast the ballots. Too often I think these places can be less than user friendly when it comes to exercising one's franchise. Rejection on minor technicalities and discarding someone's effort to express a choice in an election is something we need to minimize, to put it mildly. I support the amendment. I am happy to accept it, if the Senator wants to do it that way.

Mr. DODD. Is the amendment of the Senator from New Hampshire the same amendment as the amendment of the Senator from Colorado?

Mr. DODD. Madam President, some four decades ago, Dr. Martin Luther King said: The history of our nation is the history of a long and tireless effort to broaden and to increase the franchise of American citizens. This afternoon, we are gathered to consider the election reform bill which will live up, in my view, to the words Dr. Martin Luther King uttered 40 years ago; that is, to broaden the franchise of American citizens. It is a great honor and privilege to bring this bill to the floor, the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act, with a bipartisan compromise that will be substituted for the committee-reported text of the bill when we get to that point. As Thomas Paine once said: The right to vote is the primary right upon which all other rights are based. Therefore, there is no greater challenge facing this body than restoring Americans' faith in our electoral process. Fourteen months ago yesterday, the American public decided--the country decided--who would be the 43rd President of the United States. What we are engaged in today, and will be over the next day or so, is not any discussion or debate about the past. George W. Bush is the President of the United States and has been since January 20 of last year. This bill is about the future, what we can do to try to make our election systems more fair, bring them up to date, to make it possible for people to cast votes more easily, and to see to it that those who may want to corrupt the system somehow will find their job far more difficult. I consider this to be landmark legislation. It will help to ensure that our voting procedures are uniform and nondiscriminatory, and that Americans can have faith in the integrity of our election results. While we should not underestimate the significance of this action, we should be cautious not to overstate the Federal role in the administration of Federal elections. This legislation does not replace, nor would I tolerate it replacing, the historic role of State and local election officials, nor does it create a one-size-fits-all approach to balloting in America. We, by no means, intend to supplant the traditional role that State and local governments have played administering elections for Federal office. But, for the first time, with this legislation, the Congress-- the Federal Government--will set basic minimum requirements and provide critical resources for Federal elections. This bipartisan compromise ensures that the most fundamental right in any democracy--the right to vote and have that vote counted--will be secure. But it also allows States to meet the legislation's broad requirements in a way best suited for their voting jurisdictions. Notwithstanding this flexible approach, the primary objectives of this compromise remain expanding the franchise, protecting our Federal elections system from corruption, and providing the ongoing leadership that is required of a Federal partner. Let me be clear from the outset, this legislation is not about one State or one election. While the problems that took place in Florida a year ago last November brought the flaws in our election system to the Nation's attention, these are systemic problems that have existed in many States for many years. In fact, the General Accounting Office found that 57 percent of voting jurisdictions nationwide experienced major problems conducting the November 2000 elections. Meanwhile, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project found there have been approximately 2 million uncounted, unmarked, or spoiled ballots in each of the last four Presidential elections. Luckily, unlike many other issues that are presented to the Congress, the vast majority of the flaws in our election system are eminently fixable. As the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, found: The weaknesses in election administration are, to a very great degree, problems that Government can actually solve. We have the opportunity today to take an incremental step forward toward solving our election problems as we begin debate on the Equal Protection of Voting Rights Act. This bill also represents a major step forward for the United States Congress. For the very first time, the Federal Government will become a real partner with State and local governments in the administration of Federal elections. This legislation has been 15 months in the making. In the wake of the November 2000 elections, then-chairman of the Rules Committee, and my good friend, Mitch McConnell, first pledged that our committee would conduct a series of hearings on election reform. Under his leadership, the committee held the initial hearing on March 14 of the year 2001. When I assumed the committee chairmanship in June, I pledged to continue to make election reform the top legislative priority of the Senate Rules Committee. Toward that end, we held an additional 3 days of hearings on election reform last summer, including the committee's field hearing in Atlanta, GA. Recognizing that comprehensive election reform legislation could not be a partisan endeavor, we brought together last fall a bipartisan team of Senators devoted to this issue. Our election reform working group included, of course, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who deserves tremendous accolades for initially focusing the Rules Committee on this important issue and for being a great partner in trying to resolve the many difficult issues we resolved in presenting this piece of legislation to our colleagues; our Republican colleague from Missouri, Kit Bond, who was a passionate advocate for including provisions to ensure the integrity of Federal elections; and my fellow Rules Committee members, New York Senator Chuck Schumer and New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli, who were among the very first Members of this body to forcefully push for bipartisan election reform legislation. I am grateful to all of these Senators for their tireless work and that of their staffs who put in literally hundreds of hours to bring us to this point of considering a proposal on election reform. All of us worked many months to develop legislation that would try to meet one central goal; that was to make it easier to vote in America and much harder to corrupt our Federal election system. On December 19 of last year, we introduced the compromise legislation as a Senate substitute amendment No. 2688, an amendment to S. 565, the election reform bill reported out of the Rules Committee on August 2. Today, Majority Leader Daschle acted on his commitment to make this bill one of the first items on the Senate agenda during the 2nd session of the 107th Congress and I mark himself his considerable efforts. Our legislation simply establishes three basic minimum Federal requirements that support our principle of making it easier to vote but harder to corrupt the system: One, voting system standards so that every eligible blind or disabled person and every language minority can cast a vote privately and independently; two, provisional voting so that an eligible voter in America will never be turned away from the voting booth and voting information posted at the polls so that voters are informed of their rights; and three, statewide voter registration lists and verification for first-time voters who register by mail so that all eligible voters who choose to vote will be able to do so and those who are not eligible cannot. Our bill offers not just goals but some guarantees as well. We ensure that these reforms will be implemented by authorizing the Attorney General to bring civil action against jurisdictions that fail to comply with these requirements. The compromise also establishes a new Federal agency with four bipartisan commissioners. They will be appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate, and each will serve a single 6- year term. Our colleague, Senator Mitch McConnell, deserves great credit for originating this idea which I think is going to bring great value in years later, as other Congresses meet to consider ways to achieve the goal of making it easier to vote and harder to corrupt the system. That commission, which we will establish with this bill, will serve a very valuable purpose, where election officials from across the country can get unbiased advice and counseling as to what is the best equipment and material to have in order to improve the election system. The Election Administration Commission will eventually administer the minimum requirements and grant programs to fund them. It will also serve as a national clearinghouse and resource for information on election administration. Finally, our legislation provides Federal funding to States and localities. For the very first time, again, the Congress and the Federal Government will start paying their fair share of the cost of administering elections for Federal office. I don't believe in having Federal minimum requirements, as logical and as sensible as they are, and not coming up with the resources to our States and localities to pay for them. We do that. The Senate bill authorizes a total of $3.5 billion towards this end: $3 billion with no matching requirement over 4 years for the purpose of funding the requirements; $400 million in this fiscal year for an incentive grant program to allow States and localities to immediately fund improvements to their voting systems and election administration procedures, including education programs and other such provisions that States may see as being in their interest. We also authorize $100 million for an accessibility grant program to help make polling places physically accessible to the blind and disabled in this country. This generous commitment of Federal resources underscores the fact that nothing in this bill establishes an unfunded mandate on States or localities. We give States and localities the resources as well as the flexibility they need to get the job done. We recognize that State and local election officials are uniquely qualified to determine what voting systems and procedures are most appropriate for their individual States and communities. Importantly, in passing this bill, Congress will also meet the first civil rights challenge of the 21st century. During our hearings on election reform, our committee heard repeated testimony regarding the disproportionate treatment minorities received at the polls in the 2000 elections: African-American men asked about felony convictions; Arab Americans forced to produce citizenship papers or to take a loyalty oath; Hispanic Americans failing to receive language assistance required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The committee also received disturbing testimony regarding the disenfranchisement of Americans with disabilities. There are 21 million Americans with disabilities who did not vote in the last election. This makes the disabled community, persons with disabilities, the single largest demographic group of nonvoters in the United States of America, 21 million. We hope that with the provisions I have already mentioned in this bill, we will see that number, if not disappear entirely, certainly be reduced considerably. The General Accounting Office found that only 16 percent of all polling places in the contiguous United States are physically accessible from the parking area to the voting room. Not one of the 496 polling places visited by the General Accounting Office on election day 2000 had special ballots or voting equipment adapted for blind voters. Certain voters and communities are disproportionately affected by the inadequacies in our voting systems and election administration policies and procedures. As evidenced by testimony received by the Rules Committee and numerous commission reports and studies, racial and ethnic minorities, language minorities, disabled voters, overseas and military voters, and poor communities all encountered unique and disproportionate problems with the November 2000 elections--and elections before then, I might add--even after accounting for the effects of income, education, and poor ballot design. For example, the General Accounting Office found that both a jurisdiction's voting equipment and its demographic makeup had a statistically significant effect on the percentage of uncounted votes. The General Accounting Office found that counties with higher percentages of minority voters had higher rates of uncounted votes. The GAO also reported that percentages of uncounted Presidential votes were higher in minority areas than others, regardless of voting equipment. These findings underscore the importance of instituting minimum Federal requirements that will ensure that all voters have an equal opportunity to vote and have their vote counted. By passing this bipartisan election reform bill, the Senate will help ensure that every single eligible American has the equal opportunity to both cast a vote and, of course, have their vote counted. Let me be as clear as I can: Nothing in this bill or in this debate is intended to call into question the results of the November 2000 Presidential election. This legislation is not about the past, it is about the future of our democracy. I hope my colleagues will agree that this bill, while not a perfect piece of legislation--it does not deal with every imaginable election reform proposal--is a solid bill. It is a good bill. It is a bill that took a lot of hours and a lot of compromise between people committed to seeing to it that we improve a system that is so fundamental to the workings of our democracy. The House has already enacted comprehensive election reform. I commend Congressman Steny Hoyer and Congressman Ney, who worked very hard to put together a bill that they could pass, and we will have to meet with them and resolve differences if we are able to ultimately pass the bill that Senator McConnell and I present to the Senate today. Certainly the President also deserves a great deal of credit. He could have sat back and not included anything in his budget and said: Let's wait and see what you do up there, if you can get something done, and then talk to me. But the President included $1.2 billion in the budget he submitted several weeks ago for election reform. I thank him in this Chamber; I have done so elsewhere. It is not all the resources we will need, but it is a major commitment by the President of the United States to this issue. Our hope is that we can get our job done and get a bill passed and then take advantage of the offer made by the President in his budget proposal. Finally, we believe this compromise is constitutionally sound. The compromise is squarely within the broad grant of congressional authority to legislate in the subject area of the administration of Federal elections. The GAO concluded that with regard to the administration of Federal elections, Congress has constitutional authority over both congressional and Presidential elections. Again, I thank my colleagues who labored so hard. I thank Tom Daschle and Trent Lott, our respective leaders, for allowing this bill to come to the floor; our staffs, for their tireless work; and again, my colleagues, Mitch McConnell, Kit Bond, Chuck Schumer, Bob Torricelli, and many others who have expressed their views and thoughts on this legislation. I thank the witnesses who testified before our committee. Finally, a very special thanks is reserved for my friend, John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and my coauthor in the House of the original election reform legislation. His commitment to this issue is unparalleled. With that, I conclude with the words I opened with of Dr. Martin Luther King: The history of our Nation is the history of a long and tireless effort to broaden and to increase the franchise of American citizens. Today, when we gather to discuss this reform measure, we are fulfilling the commitment Martin Luther King suggested in his words 40 years ago--to broaden and increase that franchise. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DODD. Madam President, I call up amendment No. 2688.

Mr. DODD. I know there are discussions going on regarding a couple of proposals to try and work out some things, but I invite my colleagues, who may be engaged in other activities in their respective offices, if nothing particularly important is happening, and if they have a proposal they would like to have heard on on this bill, to come on over. We are open for business on amendments. We will consider them on either side. I do not know of many we have, but there may be some. I have talked to some colleagues who have some questions about the bill. If they do have questions, I invite them to come to the Chamber, and I will try to address them in colloquies to either alleviate their concerns--or heighten them, I suppose, depending upon my answer to their question. We would like to get this bill done. I know there are other matters. The leader, I know, wants to bring up the energy bill. I think that is the next item on the agenda. Given the amount of work we have put into election reform--and, again, I thank immensely my colleagues from Kentucky, Senator McConnell; Missouri, Senator Bond; New York, Senator Schumer; New Jersey, Senator Torricelli; Trent Lott, and Tom Daschle, the majority leader. A lot of work and a tremendous amount of effort has gone into this effort over many hours. Obviously, we are not there yet. We still have to go to a conference with the House. Our fervent hope is to get this done as soon as we can. With the $3.5 billion that we provide in this bill and the $1.2 billion the President has already put in his budget, there is every reason to believe we could actually get resources back to our States and our localities to improve the election systems for the elections this fall. There are a lot of other provisions in this bill that do not become effective for several years down the road, but for our Secretaries of State and our registrars of voters across the country who are anxious to get some financial help on these matters, if we get this bill done, get the conference report done, and then get a Presidential signature, which I think we can get if we work out this legislation, then there is every good reason to believe those resources could begin flowing to our States even this year. I do not need to remind anyone in this Chamber, or anyone in the other body, that the events of September 11 and ensuing events have overwhelmed, obviously, our attention, but it was only 14 months ago that this Nation was fixated on one of the worst election debacles in the history of the country. It is not in any way to question the outcome. We all support the outcome uncategorically. Certainly, watching day after day, week after week--and for the Presiding Officer, this was not just an intellectual exercise. As the distinguished junior Senator from the State of Florida, he knows painfully how long and how difficult this process was for his own constituents, as not only the Nation but the world was fixated on his State. I have said in this Chamber on numerous occasions, it was an unfair fixation. There were plenty of other places around the country where the problems were identical to the problems that the people of Florida went through, but because of the nature of the electoral college, the attention was focused on Florida. I think the American public--in fact, every survey I have seen-- believes our election system is in desperate need of repair. We lecture a good part of the world about how to conduct elections, how important it is to vote, how important democratic institutions are. We realized what happened last year. According to nonpartisan analyses from Caltech, MIT, the General Accounting Office, the Carter-Ford Commission, along with many other groups around the country who analyzed the elections nationwide, our system is broken. It is in serious shape and it needs repair. That is not an adverse reflection on the thousands and thousands of people all across the country who worked very hard, under very difficult circumstances, to see to it that people had the right to vote and their votes counted. We also painfully know that when it comes to allocating resources at the State level, this is a very difficult budget item; that there are always other items that seem to have more public support than the issue of better voting machines or better equipment or training for poll watchers and the like. So painfully, despite all of the notoriety about the 2000 election last year, only three States have acted, the State that the Presiding Officer represents so ably, the State of Florida, and the State of Georgia--and a great tribute should go to Cathy Cox, by the way, the Secretary of the State of Georgia. And I want to thank our two colleagues from Georgia, Max Cleland and Zell Miller, who hosted the Rules Committee's field hearing in Atlanta, GA. Also, the Governor could not have been more gracious. To their great credit, they really stepped up to the plate. Georgia, Maryland and Florida are leading the country today in some of the most innovative ideas on election reform. Unfortunately, other States did not. There is one other State that did, but after all the events of last year those are all the States that rose to the occasion. So, again, I invite my colleagues to come on over. We would like to finish this bill. I am not suggesting we go to third reading in the next few minutes, but I invite Members who have amendments to come and give us a chance to consider them, accept what we can of various proposals, debate others, vote on them, if necessary, but move the process along. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. DODD. No problem.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, the Senator from New York is about to be heard. As the majority whip pointed out, there will be no further rollcall votes tonight, but Senator Schumer has an opening statement he would like to make. There is an effort right now to reach agreement on two or three amendments by the Senator from New York. During his remarks on the bill, my hope is we might clear these other three amendments. I think that would be it for the evening, if we can do that.

Mr. DODD. I move to lay that motion on the table. The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Christopher Dodd

Speeches

Manage analytics