[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 148 (Wednesday, September 17, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Page S8903]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION

  Mr. CORNYN. I thank the Chair.
  I want to move to another topic and say I am pleased that an 
amendment which I have offered that will protect military voting rights 
has been apparently accepted as a part of the managers' package on the 
Defense authorization bill.
  This is a provision which I offered last week and we had been 
unsuccessful getting a vote on that. But I am pleased that through 
negotiations in a bipartisan effort between the bill managers, Senator 
Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Warner, 
the former chairman, who is the minority bill manager, that has been 
accepted as part of the managers' package.
  The fact is, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Election 
Assistance Commission, only 992,000 of the 6 million eligible military 
and overseas voters were able to request an absentee ballot for the 
2006 election, and only 330,000 of those ballots were filled out and 
actually reached election officials.
  That means, in other words, that only 5.5 percent of eligible 
military and overseas voters were able to fill out a ballot and mail it 
in and have it counted. To me that is a scandalous statistic, one I am 
glad that this body, in a bipartisan fashion, is going to respond to 
and say ``no more.''
  We are going to deal with this issue in a way that makes sure that 
the ballot of those who are fighting, deployed in very dangerous 
places, is going to count as much as our ballots here in the 
continental United States.

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