[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 62 (Monday, May 9, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2759-S2760]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
FLORIDA VOTING
Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I want to call to the attention
of the Senate the fact that a number of State legislatures, including
our State legislature in Florida, have been enacting election law bills
that severely constrict the right of the people to express their vote.
This has just occurred in the State of Florida, with the legislature
adjourning in the early morning hours of Saturday, enacting a bill that
has been sent to the Governor that would make it harder for the people
of Florida to vote, harder for them to have their vote counted, and
harder for the people to be able to register to vote.
Common sense would tell you what we ought to be doing is exactly the
opposite--that we ought to be making things easier to vote, and
especially in a State such as ours, which went through that awful
experience in November of 2000, when there was so much chaos, not only
in the voting in the Presidential election but then in the counting of
the votes. Of course, we all know how that ended up--Bush v. Gore in
the U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recount that was proceeding.
Because of that experience, to the credit of the State legislature,
they started to make voting easier. For example, instead of just voting
on election day, they had a 2-week period for early voting--something
that other States have been doing for some period of time, so that
people could go to designated polling places prior to election day. It
certainly made it a lot easier on the supervisors of elections, the
very people who are charged with the responsibility of registering
voters and counting votes, because it spread the amount of people
coming in to vote over time, so that all of them weren't there just
within a 12-hour period on election day. This has turned out to be so
popular in Florida that half of the voters in the last two elections
voted prior to election day.
Well, can you believe that the State legislature has seen fit to cut
the 14-
[[Page S2760]]
day early vote period back to 8, under the guise, well, we are going to
make the amount of hours the same by giving the supervisors of
elections discretion so that they could increase the voting days on
early votes from 8 to 12 hours? But that is a ruse, because that means
the election supervisors are going to have to pay time and a half, and
those election supervisors are under the same kind of fiscal
constraints that all of the other levels of government are right now
and, as a result, what is going to happen is the voting hours are not
going to be extended, and the State legislature has just constricted
the number of voting days from 14 down to 8--and, by the way, they
didn't let it run right up to the day before the election; they backed
it off several days before the election, which would be the last day of
early voting.
Why, when we want to make it easier to vote? Well, doesn't the
legislature--and I hope the Governor, who has this bill coming to him--
understand that it is a tremendous convenience to senior citizens to
make it easier for them, instead of having to stand in a long line on
election day, that over a 2-week period they can go and vote in a
designated place?
Is there some reason they are trying to make it harder for senior
citizens to vote? Well, it could be a lot of politics in this, but the
fact is they are making it harder to vote, when in fact it ought to be
the opposite.
I wish I could report to the Senate that that was the only thing they
have done, but it is not. They made it harder to register to vote. As a
matter of fact, well-respected organizations, such as the League of
Women Voters, for years and years have taken it as their responsibility
to go out and try to register people to vote. The League of Women
Voters is a nonpartisan organization, which has as its sole goal to try
to promote activities that promote our democracy. Here is what they
did. They said if you go out and register people to vote, and under
current law, there is a period of something like 1\1/2\ weeks to 2
weeks that you can turn in the names you have registered--no, no.
This time, what the legislature has done is said if you don't turn
those new registration forms in within 48 hours, you are going to be
subject to a fine and possibly a criminal penalty. And the President of
the League of Women Voters of Florida, Diedre McNabb, has said, in
effect, what that means is that they will not put that onus on their
members of a fine and a criminal penalty and, in effect, they will stop
registering people ahead of time.
What the election laws ought to do is exactly the opposite. We ought
to have laws that encourage the registration of voters and try to get
more people to participate. But that is not what the Florida
legislature has done. It has done exactly the opposite.
I wish I could report to the Senate that was the only thing they have
done. But they did more. For four decades, Florida has had a law, in a
highly mobile society, if you have moved and you go on election day to
cast your vote, and your registration address is different than the
address that you show, for example, where you registered to vote years
ago--maybe even a year ago--but in the meantime you have moved and your
documentation--say, your driver's license--shows your new address, for
four decades the law of Florida has said that a voter can change their
address in the polling place to update that record, showing proper
identification of who they are and that their signature matches.
Not so now. The legislature of Florida has just changed the law that
if your address or your name changes--what happens if you got married
in the last year and now your name doesn't match your registration
name, but you still want to vote? What has the legislature of Florida
done? They are going to require that you not cast a ballot. You are
going to have to cast a provisional ballot, and you are going to have
to have your authenticity certified after the fact.
The experience with provisional ballots in the last Presidential
election in Florida, in 2008, was that of the over 35,000 ballots cast,
17,000--half of them--were not counted.
Who are the people who have been operating and have benefited by that
law in Florida for four decades? They have been people who have gotten
married and their name has changed. They have been people in the mobile
society in which we live who have moved and bought a new house or moved
into a new apartment. In other words, all of us--we and our neighbors.
Who else especially might have been the reason for the legislature of
Florida to change this four decades-old law? The last Presidential
election, college students in Florida voted in record numbers because
college students in Florida in the town of their college went down
where they had their registration. Yet their identification showed
their address as their parents' home, not the registration address they
had registered in their college town.
That is not making it easier to vote. That is not encouraging college
students to vote. That is doing exactly the opposite. That is
suppressing the vote.
What I am reporting to the Senate has been widely commented on in
Florida in almost every editorial page in the State of Florida, with
the bottom-line conclusion of what I have just said: It is trying to
suppress the vote by making it harder to vote, harder to register to
vote, and harder to have one's vote counted as it was intended.
I have written the Governor, and I have asked the Governor to
consider all these things. It is widely commented in the Florida press
that the Governor will sign the bill, thus constricting, restricting--
whatever word you want to use--the right of the people to vote. If the
Governor does sign the bill or lets it go into law without his
signature, then our only other mechanism at this point, since there are
5 counties in Florida's 67 counties that are under a watch list under
the civil rights legislation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965--it is my
intention to encourage the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights
Division, to examine this legislation with regard to the Voting Rights
Act. Preparatory to that, I had sent a letter to Thomas Perez, the
Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division of the
Department of Justice, alerting him to this fact.
I have quoted in that letter several supervisors of election, both
Democrats and Republicans, who have said that cutting the early voting
period from 14 days to 8 will shrink poll access by 50 percent and
disenfranchise a significant number of voters. That is what the
supervisors of election, the elected officials in each of the counties,
were telling me.
I wish to quote a Republican supervisor of election, Deborah Clark,
in Pinellas County, which is the county of St. Petersburg and
Clearwater, FL. This is what she said:
Not allowing address or name change changes on election day
will create an undue burden on eligible voters.
She continues:
It will also result in long lines at the polls and
discourage many voters from voting.
It is self-evident, and this is an assault upon our democracy that
should not be tolerated. But it happened and it happened in the last
week of the legislative session. I hope--I hope--there will be such an
outcry that this legislative policy gets reversed.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Nebraska.
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