February 13, 2002

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.