[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 184 (Wednesday, October 20, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7104-S7105]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          Freedom to Vote Act

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am here to talk about voting rights 
today, and I actually am delighted that you are in the Chair, my 
colleague from Colorado, because over many years you have had so much 
to do with the fact that Colorado has the second-highest turnout of any 
State in the country--76 percent--because of what we have done, 
Republicans and Democrats and unaffiliated voters working together, to 
make sure that Coloradans can cast their ballots.
  I am tired, as I am sure you are, of hearing our colleague from 
Minnesota come down here, Senator Klobuchar, and say that Minnesota is 
No. 1 in voting, which they are. They have more than 76 percent of the 
people that vote, but I think we will catch them, and maybe we will 
catch them this year.
  But the reason why we have such a high turnout is because of things 
that we have put in place working in a bipartisan way. And when the 
Presiding Officer was the Governor of Colorado, you know, that was 
when, really, we moved to the mail-in ballot system that we have, 
completely fraud free and a delight, especially for people living in 
rural areas, where it is hard to get to the ballot box sometimes.
  And so thank you for helping create a model for the country as we 
debate this bill in front of us. In fact, much of what this bill does--
I will get to the bill in a minute--is reflective of the work that we 
have done in Colorado.
  Mr. President, you came here during a difficult time, I would say, 
for our democracy. This has been, in many ways, a near-death experience 
for the U.S. democracy. There are countries all over the world that are 
totalitarian societies who are counting on our country to fail. They 
tell us at the negotiating table every time we sit down with them that 
they think we are going to fail; that democracy isn't up to the 
challenges of the 21st century; that it doesn't move fast enough. This 
place doesn't move at all many weeks and could give a person reason to 
wonder whether or not we are going to make it work.
  But in this year, we had a particularly savage experience on January 
6, when the Capitol was invaded by our own citizens, and we were 
escorted off the floor of the Senate, taken to a secure facility, where 
I watched and the Presiding Officer watched what everybody in America 
saw, what everybody in the world saw, which were thousands of people 
streaming into this Capitol to try to stop the counting of the vote at 
the urging of then-President Trump.
  And, fortunately, because there were enough people in this body who 
wanted to confirm the vote, on January 20, we actually had a peaceful 
transfer of power, and Joe Biden became the President of the United 
States.
  Most countries that have a January 6 never survive to January 20, you 
know. And when I was a kid, it was common to see these kinds of things 
happen in other capitals around the world, places like Tehran. You 
never would have imagined it would happen here in Washington, DC.
  And now it has happened here in Washington, DC. But the big 
difference is that because more people turned out to vote than at any 
time in our country's history, we had that peaceful transfer of power.
  And now the question for all of us, I think, as Americans, is, What 
are we going do with the gift that our fellow citizens have given us by 
turning out to vote in the midst of a pandemic in record number? What 
are we going to do with that gift they have given to us--a gift of 
democracy, I would say, a new lease on life.
  And I think we have got a moral obligation to them and to our 
Nation's children and, frankly, to humanity to make sure that this 
democracy actually works for the American people and not for the 
special interests that have worked so hard to corrupt it.
  And there are so many ways before January 6 that our democracy was 
being attacked: partisan gerrymandering all over the country to allow 
politicians to pick their voters rather than have voters pick their 
politicians. That is an incredibly undemocratic thing for us to be 
doing across the country; the special interests that lobby this place 
who are basically unregulated by any campaign finance laws; the effect 
of Citizens United, which was the Supreme Court's decision that opened 
the floodgates of billionaires funding American elections instead of 
people funding American elections; and now, perhaps most egregiously, 
because it is so strategic and it is so purposeful, the attack on the 
vote all over the United States of America.
  I find it hard to believe. I am 54 years--56. That is the saddest 
story I have ever told. I am 56 years old, Mr. President. As you know, 
I went to college in the 1980s, you know, and now I am seeing laws 
passed that I read about in the 1980s that passed in the 1960s to try 
to deny people the right to vote all over the country, to make it 
harder to vote.
  Just this year, 19 States have passed 33 laws undermining democracy; 
laws to make it harder to vote early or vote by mail, two things we 
treasure in the State of Colorado; laws to slash the number of drop 
boxes or put them in really inconvenient places so people can't vote, 
as I do every single election with a drop box just a few blocks from my 
house. It takes me 30 seconds to vote, completely fraud free. Everyone 
in America should have the benefit of that.
  We have got a law that made it a crime in Georgia to give people 
water while they are waiting in line to vote.
  So I know there is a tendency around this place sometimes to just 
think that our democracy, just because it has always been here, that it 
is always going to be around, to assume that we can coast on the blood 
and the sweat and the tears of Americans who came before us, who fought 
generation after generation after generation to make this country more 
democratic, more fair, and more free. This is not a time for coasting. 
This is a time for us to deal with the profound threat that is stealing 
the right of Americans all over this country to vote, to have their

[[Page S7105]]

voice heard, to be able to have a say in the direction of our democracy 
or whether we are going to have a democracy at all, whether we are 
going to accept the world where politicians, like the people in this 
body but at the State legislatures, can overturn the independent 
judgment of other parts of the election apparatus, people that held the 
line this year when somebody in the White House was trying to 
intimidate them to change their mind.
  We have got people in this country, State legislators, who are 
passing laws that would allow them to do exactly what Donald Trump said 
he wanted them to do, which was overturn the election judgments of 
independently elected or appointed officials. That is something we 
cannot allow to have happen because the minute that does happen, you 
lose the democracy. The minute you cannot make a decision at the voting 
booth, at the voting box, at the poll, the minute you can no longer 
make a decision there that is held up no matter who wins and no matter 
who loses, that has the confidence of the American people, that is when 
you lose the democracy because the whole point of a democracy, the way 
we make decisions, is a peaceful transfer of power.
  And in the absence of that very, very unusual aspect of our society 
compared to other societies around the world and the history of 
humanity, in the absence of that, what you confront is political 
violence like the violence that we saw on January 6, where people tried 
to take by force something that should have been decided and was 
decided at the ballot box.
  And all of this, in my view, is why it is so important for us to pass 
the Freedom to Vote Act. The bill includes commonsense reforms that are 
broadly supported by the American people, and that is because they 
reflect common sense, just like the American people.
  And we know these reforms work, Mr. President, because we have 
already passed them in Colorado, thanks in large part to your 
leadership. We banned partisan gerrymandering. We don't have it in our 
State.
  So, again, politicians in Colorado don't have the right to choose who 
their voters are; voters get to choose who their elected leaders are.
  We have automatic voter registration, as this bill has; early voting, 
so people have a chance to get off work and go to vote and don't have 
to just be there on election day.
  Vote by mail, which I have to say, up until the last President's 
Presidency, there was no one in America that was concerned about vote 
by mail. We had cast millions of ballots in this country without a 
shred of fraud. Just ask the American Enterprise Institute. They are 
the ones that said you are more likely to get struck by lightning than 
participate in voter fraud by voting by mail. That is not a Democratic-
leaning organization, as everybody on this floor knows.
  Secure drop boxes in your neighborhood, where it takes 30 seconds to 
vote--every time I go there, next to the Botanic Gardens in my 
neighborhood in Denver, and I drop my ballot off, I think about all the 
people all over this country in 2021 who don't have the simple ability 
to drop their ballot off in a ballot box, who are having to wait in 
line for hours for the privilege to vote just because of the State they 
live in.
  We should have basic national standards for people. It is a civil 
rights issue. It is an issue that is fundamental to our democracy. And 
having a convenient ballot box is one of those things. Having mail-in 
ballots is one of those things. We have had zero fraud in our system.
  And as I said earlier, in many ways, it is as important to rural 
Colorado as any other part of our State because the people live a long 
way from the ballot box.
  If our State's history is any guide at all, we can do this in a 
bipartisan way. And it is not surprising to me that vast majorities of 
Americans, whether they are Republicans or Independents or Democrats, 
support the provisions that are in this bill by wide, wide margins.
  I am going to be pleased to go back to Colorado and have the chance 
to tell them that we have banned dark money from our political system; 
that the Supreme Court's fundamental misunderstanding in Citizens 
United, where they completely misdefined the problem and failed to see 
the corruption of inaction that happens around here, the things that 
aren't done because of the dark money that is spent in our elections 
because--for fear that some billionaire is going to show up and throw 
what to them is nothing into a race that could determine the outcome of 
our elections.
  We have got to change that, and the only way we can do that is by 
passing this bill. And I think that if we pass this bill, what we find 
is that States all over this country would see 76 percent of the people 
voting, just like in Colorado, instead of 50 percent of the people 
voting or 40 percent of the people voting. That would have a huge 
impact on what we are doing. We could show the world that we can 
actually compete with the communist government in China. We can resolve 
the question about whether democracy is up to this in the 21st century 
or not.

  We could invest in the next generation of Americans. We could improve 
our schools, improve our roads and bridges, and invest in the future 
again, as so many generations of Americans have done in the past when 
they stood up for democracy and the next generation of Americans. That 
is the question that we are confronted with today as we take this vote.
  Are we going to stand up for our democracy? Are we going to stand up 
for humanity, who is relying on us to deliver a democracy that works? 
And are we going to stand up for the next generation of Americans and 
remain a beacon to the rest of the world, committed to our highest 
ideals and not our worst instincts?
  I think we have the chance today when we take this vote to follow 
generations of Americans who have, in their lives, lived out those best 
ideals, rather than caving into our worst instincts.
  It seems to me--putting Democrats and Republicans aside--the question 
in front of us is: Are you for democracy or not? Are you for the 
freedom to vote or not? Are you for maximizing fraud-free elections, 
where people can actually turn out to vote no matter where they live? 
Or are you suppressing the vote of our fellow countrymen and women?
  That is the question before us. And because it is such a clear 
question, I would urge every one of my colleagues, Republican or 
Democrat, to vote for this legislation so we can set a basic standard 
for what the freedom of vote should look like in the United States of 
America.
  With that, Mr. President, I appreciate your indulgence and patience.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. ERNST. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.