[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 80 (Monday, May 10, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2406-S2407]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Election Security

  Madam President, on one final point, I would like to call once again 
for both sides to stop using elections as a partisan weapon.
  As I have mentioned before, the claim by some Trump supporters that a 
certain brand of voting machine switched votes was lifted entirely from 
the Democrats' 2004 playbook. President Trump's questioning of his loss 
in Georgia was simply following in the

[[Page S2407]]

footsteps of the losing candidate for Governor 2 years before. She lost 
by over 50,000 votes and has never even bothered to try to prove voting 
irregularities on that scale.
  Just ask Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who got into 
hot water from Trump supporters and was briefly celebrated by the 
Democrats for defending the integrity of the Georgia election. He will 
be the first to tell you that attacks on Georgia's election system 
started not with Trump but with Democrats
  Democrats decided to take their partisan election attack nationwide. 
This is what led to H.R. 1, the so-called by Speaker Pelosi For the 
People Act. The title alone reveals it as a propaganda bill. They 
didn't take the time to draft something from scratch since the purpose 
was partisan messaging, not enacting thoughtful reform of our election 
laws. They just cobbled together every election mandate bill introduced 
by a Democrat in recent years into one giant package, taking little 
care to make sure it all made sense together and without working with 
local election officials to see if it was even a practical approach.
  Democrats have now reframed the same bill in a response to what they 
call the big lie, that the 2020 election was illegitimate, but it was 
actually written in 2019 to double down on Democrats' own big lie 
questioning the legitimacy of the various elections they lost in 2018.
  America's elections are free and fair. That is true in Iowa, in 
Georgia, and all 50 States. It was true in 2018 and in 2020, and I am 
confident it will be true in 2022.
  Foreign adversaries like Russia and China cast doubt on the soundness 
of our democratic system both to weaken it from within and to justify 
their own repressive regimes. Influence efforts to do just that have 
been part of the KGB playbook for decades. But foreign agents can't 
hold a candle to what we Americans are doing to ourselves. Casting 
doubt on elections may be good politics in the short run, but it does 
real damage in the long run. Let's all agree to stop this sort of 
peddling of doubts about the elections.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.