[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 99 (Tuesday, July 17, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S7735]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               ELECTIONS

  Mr. DODD. Mr. President, I am going to come to the floor later with 
lengthier remarks, but there are two subject matters I want to bring to 
the attention of my colleagues that I am sure they have taken note of 
over the last several days. The first is the continuing reports about 
last year's elections in the United States. Obviously, there was 
particular focus on the State of Florida. But, Mr. President, as you 
know because of your deep interest in the subject as well, we believe 
this was not exclusively a Florida issue. Nor was it merely an issue 
involving the national election last year. Mr. President, we have a 
serious problem, based on a number of studies that have been conducted 
by Members of the other body as well as the Civil Rights Commission and 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whereby as many as 6 million 
people did not have their votes counted last year. That is in addition, 
I suppose, to the 3 million people we now know who actually tried to 
vote but were told they were not allowed to vote despite the fact they 
actually had the right.
  That is now 9 million people. I know of 10 million people who are 
blind in this country who did not vote last year. Only one State in the 
United States actually allows people who are blind to go in and vote on 
their own. In any other jurisdiction, if you are blind you must be 
accompanied by someone else. You never get to vote in private, in spite 
of the fact there is hardly an elevator in America built in the last 5 
years where there is not Braille to assist you. You can operate an 
elevator alone but you cannot cast a ballot alone in the United States.
  So there is a growing sense of scandal, in my view, not because 
someone was involved in some criminal enterprise to deprive people of 
the right to vote or to manufacture or manipulate the outcome of the 
election. I use the word ``scandal'' to speak of a situation in which 
only one out of every two eligible Americans is casting his or her 
vote. And even those who do are not having their votes counted 
properly; that is of deep concern to me.
  Patrick Henry, one of the great voices that gave birth to this 
Nation, once said that the right to vote is the right upon which all 
other rights depend. I believe he was correct more than 230 years ago, 
and even now, as we enter into the 21st century.
  We lecture the world all the time on how to conduct free and 
democratic elections, yet there is a growing body of evidence that 
suggests we could do a much better job in America in how our elections 
are conducted, in what support we provide our local communities and 
precincts, and by setting some national standards so we never again 
idly sit and watch an election during which as many as 6 million votes 
went uncounted. These were people who exercised their civic 
responsibility and showed up on election day to cast a ballot and, 
because of faulty machinery or other shortcomings, their ballots were 
never counted--not to mention the people suffering a variety of 
physical disabilities who were denied that right as well.
  It is my hope that in the coming weeks, as we gather more information 
from across the country about how we could do a better job, we will put 
adequate resources into this. I say this as my seatmate, normally 
sitting to my right, is now sitting over here in a chair to the left--
the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. I have not had a chance 
to speak with the chairman about this. I will not abuse a public forum 
to do so at this moment, but I know he cares about these issues as much 
as I do, and we might talk about how we might provide some resources to 
our States to ensure that the equipment is modernized, that we no 
longer have machinery that is a half century old in some cases, as it 
is, to be used by people who wish to cast their ballots. My hope is we 
can come up with some national standards, provide the resources to our 
States, and do a much better job, a much better job in seeing to it 
that people vote in this country and that their votes are then counted.

  I cannot begin adequately to express the sense of outrage I sense 
among people all across this country who were so terribly disappointed, 
to put it mildly, who went to vote and discovered their votes were not 
counted.
  Put aside your feelings about the outcome of the election. We have a 
President. His name is George W. Bush. I stood on the west front of the 
Capitol on January 20, and I certainly believe in the depths of my soul 
that this is the President of the United States. My concerns are not 
about the legitimacy of the person who sits in the White House. My 
concerns are about the legitimacy of a process that I think is in dire 
need of repair--the election process in this country.
  I don't know how much more evidence we need to have accumulated by 
independent studies based on last year's results, especially now that 
the New York Times, Miami Herald, other newspapers, as well as the 
organizations I have already mentioned, have looked at the elections of 
last year and have concluded by and large that there are serious 
problems with the present electoral process.
  I would like to address this issue at greater length later today, but 
I wanted to raise the matter here before we went into recess over the 
next hour or two.
  Finally, I would like to mention a matter that I think is 
tremendously important--and I should point out to my colleagues here 
that the Presiding Officer shares an equal passion about this issue as 
the Senator from Connecticut. I look forward very much, working with 
him as a member of the Judiciary Committee that has very specific 
jurisdiction over the Voting Rights Act of 1965, on how we can listen 
to people across this country, gather as much adequate information as 
we can and then propose to our colleagues some meaningful ideas, both 
resources and ideas, on how we can minimize the electoral problems that 
occurred not just last year but have been occurring over the last 
number of years.

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