[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 128 (Thursday, September 20, 2012)]
[House]
[Page H6159]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1050
                        VOTER DISENFRANCHISEMENT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Grijalva) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GRIJALVA. Mr. Speaker, this week marks the United States 
Constitution's 225th anniversary.
  Our Constitution is a product of realistic compromise and intelligent 
consensus--a trait, I might add, sorely missing in this Chamber.
  It lays out the central principles for a democratic government and 
the rights that citizens can expect to enjoy in that government. With 
the inclusion of six voting rights amendments, we have formed a more 
solid democracy.
  The voting rights amendments fundamentally changed our system of 
government--outlawing poll taxes in Federal elections, giving ordinary 
Americans the right to elect their Senators, allowing the citizens of 
our Nation's Capital to vote for President, and guaranteeing that all 
Americans--regardless of race, religion, gender, or age--would enjoy 
these protections.
  With these protections and these amendments, we affirmed the inherent 
values of our Constitution and our democracy.
  The right to vote is still, to this day, the essential piece of our 
democracy.
  Think about it. To deny an eligible voter the opportunity to vote is 
to undermine the very freedom that defines us as a Nation. The right to 
vote is essential to our democracy.
  However, while the marches of student demonstrators and religious 
leaders once drove electoral reform in the United States, a new and 
dark movement is sweeping across the country. State lawmakers have been 
pushed by corporate interests and driven by a cynical point of view 
that says: We must deny other people the right to vote in order to 
continue to keep our power, and we must target those groups and 
individuals who may not agree with our point of view. With this cynical 
selective process, we keep power and we only concentrate on the people 
and extend the privileges to those that agree with our point of view.
  New voter laws that are now being proposed and have passed in State 
legislatures make voter registration more difficult and cumbersome, cut 
the availability of early voting, and require voters to present current 
government-issued identifications as a prerequisite to casting a 
ballot. These efforts threaten the integrity of our democratic system 
and are very clearly targeted.
  The new restrictions on voting would disproportionately burden 
African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, young voters, and 
Americans new to the political process.
  Plain and simple, these restrictive voter laws threaten to 
disenfranchise young, poor, minority, and elderly voters who lack 
formal government-issued IDs despite the fact that it is more likely 
that an American will be struck and killed by lightning than he would 
impersonate another voter at the polls. We know exactly what these 
voter suppression laws mean.
  In Texas, a Federal court recently found that the Texas voter ID law 
violated the Voting Rights Act because it made it harder for African 
Americans and Latinos to vote. The court stated that evidence 
conclusively shows that the cost of obtaining a qualified ID will fall 
more heavily on the poor, and a disproportionate number of African 
Americans and Latinos in Texas live in poverty.
  In Pennsylvania, a July 5 Philadelphia Inquirer article reported that 
758,000 registered voters in Pennsylvania do not have an ID, a new 
State law requirement for voting. That figure represents 9.2 percent of 
the State's voters that could be stopped from voting.
  A report by the Brennan Center for Justice found that allegations of 
widespread voter fraud often proved greatly exaggerated. Moreover, 
these claims of voter fraud are frequently used to justify policies 
that do not solve the alleged wrongs but could well disenfranchise 
legitimate voters.
  In some States, veterans' ID cards won't be sufficient as a photo ID 
to vote.
  In the last 12 months in my State of Arizona, there has been an 
accelerated effort to suppress the vote. These new efforts represent a 
coordinated effort clearly designed to suppress the vote of those 
people who need to make sure that their government is paying attention 
to their needs.
  People of color, women, young people literally risked, and some lost, 
their lives to gain the right to vote in this Nation of ours. 
Throughout its history, our country has tried to remove obstacles to 
voter participation, making the right to vote accessible to all 
eligible citizens.
  We cannot turn our back on that fundamental right. Our legacy as a 
Nation demands better of us.

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