[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 195 (Tuesday, December 11, 2018)]
[House]
[Pages H10035-H10036]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           VOTER SUPPRESSION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Virginia (Mr. Connolly) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. CONNOLLY. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk about a troubling 
development, which is called voter suppression, and its use as a tool 
in political combat today. President Trump wrote the playbook on sham 
claims of voter fraud, and now, sadly, my friends on the other side of 
the aisle are putting that playbook to use.
  During the 2016 Presidential election, then candidate Trump warned 
that the election would be rigged. Once in office, the President then 
made unsubstantiated assertions that there were more than 3 million 
illegal votes cast in the United States, just coincidentally the margin 
of popular advantage his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had over him.
  The President then established a so-called election integrity 
commission that alleged substantial evidence of voter fraud, found 
none, and had to be disbanded. That purportedly independent commission 
was headed, by the way, by Kansas Secretary of State at the time Kris 
Kobach, a known proponent of voter fraud conspiracy theories that then 
justified voter suppression on a large scale.
  The President used his bully pulpit to claim that midterm ballots 
were massively infected and called for a halt to vote counts in legally 
mandated recounts in Georgia and Florida.
  Here is what is really going on. When an election is too close to 
call, rather than encourage the democratic process to play out by 
counting every vote, Republicans are flipping through Trump's voter 
fraud playbook to sow distrust in democratic processes.

[[Page H10036]]

  In Florida, for example, Republican Governor Rick Scott, now Senator-
elect, undermined confidence in the State's own recount process by 
making his own unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud and 
filed lawsuits against and called for investigations into certain 
Democratic-leaning counties.
  In Georgia, Secretary of State Brian Kemp refused to step down from 
his role overseeing his own election to be Governor of the State. Under 
his management, more than a half a million people were purged from 
voting rolls in July of 2017. That election was decided by just tens of 
thousands of votes. It makes a difference.
  In North Carolina's Ninth Congressional District today, the State 
Elections Board is investigating whether a local GOP operative 
illegally collected absentee ballots and altered votes or never 
submitted them. It may yet lead to, frankly, the decertification of 
that election and a new special election to be called.
  In Wisconsin and Michigan, the GOP-controlled, lame duck State 
legislatures have pushed through a series of measures that would strip 
the incoming Democratic Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of 
State of key authorities and restrict access to early voting.
  We have seen this before. It is part of a pattern, unfortunately, of 
voter suppression: purging voter rolls; difficult voter I.D. 
restrictions; eliminating early voting; outdated and insufficient 
voting machines; and long lines, especially in minority precincts.
  In 2016, North Carolina closed early voting stations and, just 
coincidentally, reduced African American voting by 8.5 percent, clearly 
a dispositive difference.
  Republican governors like Governor Scott of Florida have exercised 
their discretion to restore felon voting rights in as restrictive a 
manner as possible. His predecessor, Governor Charlie Crist, now our 
colleague, restored voting rights to 155,000 individuals in Florida in 
4 years. Governor Scott averaged just 400 per year.
  In Wisconsin, a strict voter I.D. law has been credited with 
suppressing the vote of more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters who were 
otherwise eligible to cast a ballot in 2016.
  Could that have made a difference in the electoral vote of the State 
of Wisconsin?

                              {time}  1045

  These tactics undermine democracy. They are not worthy of the party 
of Lincoln, and they further erode America's trust in government.
  I implore my friends on the other side of the aisle: Let's win fair 
or square. Let's make sure every American's vote is counted and is 
treated as sacred. America will be the stronger for it.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Members are reminded to refrain from 
engaging in personalities toward the President of the United States.

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