[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 11 (Tuesday, January 18, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S267-S272]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               H.R. 5746

  Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I rise today to urge the Senate to take 
action to protect voting rights and to defend our democracy. Voting is 
foundational to our democracy. In a strong, functioning democracy, the 
playing field is level. Citizens have a right to vote, and neither one 
side nor the other has the right to block those voters from the ballot 
box or from getting their votes counted.
  That basic premise no longer holds in America. Let's be blunt. 
American democracy is under attack from Republican politicians. In the 
past year alone, Republican State legislatures have passed laws in 
nearly 20 States to restrict American citizens' right to vote.
  The Republican nominees to the Supreme Court have destroyed 
longstanding protections against dark money in politics; they have 
given the green light to partisan gerrymandering; and they have gutted 
the Voting Rights Act. Republican dark money networks are bankrolling 
voter suppression efforts with hundreds of millions of dollars in 
lobbying and advertising.
  And for years and years, Republican Donald Trump and Republican 
politicians have spread lies about the integrity of our elections. Last 
January 6, a Republican President, backed up by Republicans right here 
in this Senate, provoked a deadly insurrection at our Nation's Capitol.
  And in the intervening year, Republican leaders have refused to 
accept evidence of President Biden's 7 million-vote victory over Donald 
Trump. Instead, they have fed conspiracies and lies that further 
undermine our democracy.
  Yes, American democracy is under attack, and, today, 50 Democratic 
Senators agree on the right response to this attack. The Freedom to 
Vote Act would guarantee that every American citizen can easily vote 
and get their vote counted.
  The act would defend against attempts to overturn the will of the 
people; the act would reform our broken campaign finance system and 
help root out dark money; and, critically important, the act would ban 
partisan gerrymandering by either side.
  The companion bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, 
would restore historic protections against State laws that have the 
purpose and the effect of discriminating on the basis of race.
  Unfortunately, Senate Republicans would rather destroy our democracy 
than have free and fair elections, and so they support those around the 
country who are trying to block access to voting and who are trying to 
rig how votes get counted.
  Elections are about the will of the majority, but the Republicans in 
the Senate don't want what a majority of Americans want. In fact, the 
50 Republicans in the Senate, together, represent 41\1/2\ million fewer 
Americans than the Democratic majority, but instead of taking a simple 
vote to protect American citizens' access to the polls, they want to 
stop legislation to defend the very foundation of our democracy from 
even getting a vote on the floor of the Senate.
  Let me be clear. My view on this is that the filibuster has no place 
in our democracy. Our Founders believed deeply in protections for the 
minority, and those are enshrined in the Constitution and in the 
structure of Congress. But our Founders made it clear that, after 
extended debate, the majority could always get a vote. And that final 
vote--except in the case of treaties and impeachment--would always be 
by simple majority. The Founders did not add a filibuster. With two 
exceptions, they insisted on plain old majority rule.
  When the Senate changed its rules a decade later, the filibuster 
became the favored tool of racists and segregationists. The filibuster 
preserved Jim Crow laws and stalled civil rights legislation for 
decades. The filibuster helped block the passage of anti-lynching 
legislation for over 100 years. The filibuster nearly stopped Congress 
from passing the most important voting rights law in our Nation's 
history--the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
  Today's filibuster does not foster bipartisanship and compromise. In 
fact, the exact opposite is true. The filibuster has been weaponized to 
intensify partisan division.
  The filibuster is a wicked tool used to kill legislation supported by 
the majority of Americans of all political parties, and that is true 
for protecting the right to vote and gun safety legislation and 
immigration reform and codifying Roe v. Wade.
  The filibuster thwarts the will of the people. Today's filibuster 
doesn't encourage debate; it promotes power. Senators can torpedo bills 
without saying a single word in public or even stepping to the floor of 
the U.S. Senate. This is not how a so-called deliberative body should 
operate.
  Senators should be required to talk and vote instead of hiding behind 
a rule. They should have to put skin in the game. If Republicans are 
fine with the wave of anti-voter laws being enacted in State after 
State, then they should have to come to the floor and make that clear. 
If Republicans oppose reinstating the Voting Rights Act that passed in 
this Chamber unanimously in 2006, their constituents and the historical 
record should know exactly where they stand.
  Instead, because of how today's filibuster works, we have two sets of 
rules in our country, one for Democrats, who want to promote civil 
rights and liberties, and another set for Republicans, who want to take 
them away. Republicans who want to close polling places, who want to 
limit voting, who want to pass gerrymandered maps are hard at work 
doing that right now with simple majorities in State legislatures all 
across this country. They face no filibusters to stop them. It is 
majority rule all the way.

  And here in Washington, when Republicans want to pass massive tax 
cuts for billionaires and rig our Tax Code to favor big businesses, an 
exception to the filibuster lets them do just that with a simple 
majority.
  Republicans who want to pack the Supreme Court with extremists 
Justices who roll back fundamental rights and who disregard the rule of 
law can do that with a simple majority right here in the U.S. Senate. 
But a majority of Democratic Senators--again, Democrats who, together, 
represent over 40 million more Americans than the Republican Senators--
a majority of Democrats cannot pass legislation to improve the lives of 
Americans.
  Democrats want to raise the minimum wage; Democrats want to lower the 
cost of prescription drugs and healthcare; and Democrats want to 
protect the right to vote. But too often we cannot achieve these goals 
because the filibuster gives the minority party an almost total veto 
over legislation, including the legislation we need to save our 
American democracy.
  We can't ignore Republicans' attempts to rig free and fair elections 
in this country. We can't roll over when Republicans want to make it 
harder for Black Americans to vote. We can't look the other way when 
Republicans want to make it tough for Latinos and Asian Americans to 
vote.

[[Page S268]]

  We can't be silent when Republicans make voting harder on Tribal 
lands. We can't shrink back when Republicans work to keep students from 
voting. We can't turn away when Republicans try to keep working-class 
people or anyone who might be more inclined to vote for Democrats--keep 
them away from the polls. That is not how democracy works.
  In a democracy, the most votes win--period. In a democracy, the 
Senate debates, and then the Senate votes. And in a democracy, the 
people--not the politicians--decide who will lead the Nation.
  This week, the eyes of the Nation and the entire world are on the 
U.S. Senate. We can choose to protect the tool of Jim Crow and 
segregation that is found nowhere in the Constitution or we can choose 
to defend the sacred right to vote.
  I urge the Senate to protect our democracy and to protect the right 
of every American citizen to vote and to have their vote counted.
  Some of our Republican colleagues have made the dishonest claim that 
there is no voter suppression crisis, and there is no need for Federal 
voting rights legislation. So I would like to enter into the Record a 
series of articles that demonstrate the voter suppression taking place 
in State after State in this country.
  I will start by reminding everyone that the Supreme Court--led by 
Chief Justice John Roberts--opened the door to all of these anti-voter 
tactics by gutting preclearance from the Voting Rights Act and by 
turning its back on equal justice under law.
  So first I will read excerpts from an article published in Vox on 
July 21, 2021, entitled: ``How America lost its commitment to the right 
to vote.''

       The Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan lamented in a 
     dissenting opinion earlier this month, ``has treated no 
     statute worse'' than the Voting Rights Act.
       She's right.
       The Voting Rights Act is arguably the most successful civil 
     rights law in [all of] American history. Originally signed in 
     1965, it was the United States' first serious attempt since 
     Reconstruction to build a multiracial democracy--and it 
     worked. Just two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed 
     the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration . . 
     . in the Jim Crow stronghold of Mississippi skyrocketed from 
     6.7 percent to nearly 60 percent.
       And yet, in a trio of cases--Shelby County v. Holder [in] 
     (2013), Abbott v. Perez [in] (2018), and Brnovich v. DNC [in] 
     (2021)--the Court drained nearly all of the life out of this 
     landmark civil rights statute.
       After Brnovich, the decision that inspired [Justice] 
     Kagan's statement that the Court has treated the Voting 
     Rights Act worse than any other federal law, it's unclear 
     whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of voting 
     rights plaintiffs even if [the] state legislature tried to 
     outright rig an election.
       These cases are the culmination of more than half a century 
     of efforts by conservatives who, after failing to convince 
     elected lawmakers to weaken voting rights, turned to an 
     unelected judiciary to enact a policy that would never have 
     made it through Congress. All of this is bad news for 
     minority voters in America, who are [the] most likely to be 
     disadvantaged by many of the new restrictions currently being 
     pushed in statehouses across America, and for the country's 
     relatively young commitment to multiracial democracy. And 
     there are at least three reasons to fear that decisions like 
     Shelby County and Brnovich foreshadow even more aggressive 
     attacks on the right to vote.
       The first is that Republican partisans can use race as a 
     proxy to identify communities with large numbers of 
     Democratic voters. In 2020, according to the Pew Research 
     Center, 92 percent of non-Hispanic Black voters supported 
     Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump--and that's 
     after Trump slightly improved his performance among African 
     Americans compared to 2016.
       That means that state lawmakers who wish to prevent 
     Democrats from voting can do so through policies that make it 
     harder for Black voters (and, to a lesser extent, most other 
     nonwhite voters) to cast a ballot. And Republican lawmakers 
     haven't been shy about doing so. As a federal appeals court 
     wrote in 2016 about a North Carolina law that included many 
     provisions making it harder to vote, ``the new provisions 
     target African Americans with almost surgical precision.''
       An even starker example: Georgia recently enacted a law 
     that effectively enables the state Republican Party to 
     disqualify voters and shut down polling precincts. If the 
     state GOP wields this law to close down most of the polling 
     places in the highly Democratic, majority-Black city of 
     Atlanta, it's unclear that a Voting Rights Act that's been 
     gravely wounded by three Supreme Court decisions remains 
     vibrant enough to block them.
       The second reason to be concerned about decisions like 
     Brnovich is that the Supreme Court's attacks on the Voting 
     Rights Act are not isolated. They are part of a greater web 
     of decisions making it much harder for voting rights 
     plaintiffs to prevail in court.
       These cases include decisions like Purcell v. Gonzalez [in] 
     (2006), which announced that judges should be very reluctant 
     to block unlawful state voting rules close to an election; 
     Crawford v. Marion County Election Board [in] (2008), which 
     permitted states to enact voting restrictions that target 
     largely imaginary problems; and Rucho v. Common Cause [in] 
     (2019), which would ban federal courts from hearing partisan 
     gerrymandering lawsuits because the Court's GOP-appointed 
     majority deemed such cases too ``difficult to adjudicate.''
       Finally, decisions like Shelby County and Brnovich are 
     troubling because the Court's reasoning in those opinions 
     appears completely divorced from the actual text of the 
     Constitution and from the text of federal laws such as the 
     Voting Rights Act. Shelby County eliminated the Voting Rights 
     Act's requirement that states with a history of racist 
     election practices ``preclear'' any new voting rules with 
     officials in Washington, DC. It was rooted in what Chief 
     Justice John Roberts described as ``the principle that all 
     States enjoy equal sovereignty,'' a principle that is never 
     mentioned once in the text of the U.S. Constitution.
       In Brnovich, the Court upheld two Arizona laws that 
     disenfranchise voters who vote in the wrong precinct and 
     limit who can deliver an absentee ballot to a polling place. 
     [Justice] Alito purports to take ``a fresh look at the 
     statutory text'' in this case. But he imposes new limits on 
     the Voting Rights Act--such as a strong presumption that 
     voting restrictions that were in place in 1982 are lawful, or 
     a similar presumption favoring state laws purporting to 
     prevent voter fraud--[qualifications] which have no basis 
     whatsoever in the law's text.
       As [Justice] Kagan writes in dissent, Brnovich ``mostly 
     inhabits a law-free zone.''
       That doesn't necessarily mean that this Supreme Court will 
     allow any restriction on voting to stand--under the most 
     optimistic reading of cases like Brnovich, the Court might 
     still intervene if Georgia tries to close down most of the 
     polling places in Atlanta--but it does mean that voting 
     rights lawyers and their clients can no longer expect to win 
     their cases simply because Congress passed a law protecting 
     their right to vote.
       The rules in American elections are now what [Justice] 
     Roberts and his five even more conservative colleagues say 
     they are--not what the Constitution or any act of Congress 
     has to say about voting rights.

  Mr. President, Republicans are not just content with making it harder 
to vote. They are also passing State laws allowing them to replace 
local election officials with those who will administer elections in 
their favor. Unsurprisingly, they are targeting areas with huge Black 
populations, like Atlanta, that helped determine the outcome of the 
2020 election cycle.
  And they are targeting smaller places, too. As described in an 
article published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on December 29, 
2021, entitled ``New Election Board in Lincoln County Seeks Central 
Voting Site,'' a replacement elections board is planning to close all 
seven polling places in Lincoln County, north of Augusta, requiring in-
person voters to report to one centralized location. The poll closures 
would reduce voting access for rural residents, who would have to drive 
15 miles or more to cast a ballot in a county with no public 
transportation option, leading to opposition from voting rights 
advocates.
  The plan is moving forward after a State law passed this year 
abolished the previous county elections board and gave a majority of 
appointments to the Republican county commissioner. Now, Lincoln is one 
of six counties where the Republican-controlled Georgia General 
Assembly reorganized local elections boards.
  ``This is about the powerful flexing their muscles and saying, `We 
can do whatever we want to do and who is going to stop us?' '' said the 
Reverend Denise Freeman, who is organizing Lincoln voters to oppose the 
poll closures. She goes on to say: ``In Lincoln County, it's always 
been about power and control.''
  The remade board is the same as before, with one exception: A 
Democratic Party appointee was replaced by an appointee of the county 
commission, whose five members are all Republicans. The elections board 
could vote on the poll closure plan on January 19.
  ``Folks should have access to their polling locations. They should be 
able to vote without having to drive 30 minutes to get there,'' said 
Cindy Battles of the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, a civil 
rights group that has been collecting voter signatures for a petition 
drive to try to stop the closures.
  There is no public transportation available in Lincoln County, nor 
are

[[Page S269]]

there taxis, Uber or Lyft. Anyone who wants to vote would have to drive 
or walk to a polling place, or return an absentee ballot. Turnout 
decreases when voters have to travel farther to cast a ballot, 
according to a statistical analysis by the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution.
  Polling places can be closed by a majority vote in Lincoln County, 
and the Federal Government has no oversight role. A 2013 U.S. Supreme 
Court decision removed the requirements of the Voting Rights Act for 
States with a history of discrimination, including Georgia, to obtain 
Federal preclearance before making changes to voting practices and 
locations.

  And what happened?
  County election boards closed 214 precincts across Georgia between 
2012 and 2018. That is nearly 8 percent of the State's total polling 
places, according to a count by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
  Mr. President, Republican efforts have already succeeded at 
disenfranchising voters, especially Black voters. So I now want to 
share the impact that limiting polling places had on voters during the 
last Presidential election in Georgia, using an excerpt from an NPR 
article published on October 17, 2020, entitled ``Why Do Nonwhite 
Georgia Voters Have to Wait in Line for Hours? Too Few Polling 
Places.''
  Here is the story:

       Kathy spotted the long line of voters as she pulled into 
     the Christian City Welcome Center about 3:30 p.m., ready to 
     cast her ballot in the June 9 primary election.
       Hundreds of people were waiting in the heat and rain 
     outside the lush, tree-lined complex in Union City, an 
     Atlanta suburb with 22,400 residents, nearly 88% of them 
     Black. She briefly considered not casting a ballot at all, 
     but she decided to stay.
       By the time she got inside more than five hours later, five 
     hours later, the polls had officially closed and the 
     electronic scanners were all shut down. Poll workers told her 
     she would have to cast a provisional ballot, but they 
     promised that her vote would be counted.
       ``I'm now angry again, I'm frustrated again, and now I have 
     an added emotion, which is anxiety,'' said Kathy, a human 
     services worker, recalling her emotions at the time. She 
     asked that her full name not be used because she fears 
     repercussions from speaking out. ``I'm wondering if my ballot 
     is going to count.''
       By the time the last voter finally got inside the welcome 
     center to cast a ballot, it was the next day, June 10.
       The clogged polling locations in metro Atlanta reflect an 
     underlying pattern: the number of places to vote has shrunk 
     statewide, with little recourse. Although the reduction in 
     polling places has taken place across racial lines, it has 
     primarily caused long lines in nonwhite neighborhoods where 
     voter registration has surged and more residents cast ballots 
     in person on Election Day. The pruning of polling places 
     started long before the pandemic, which has discouraged 
     people from voting in person.
       In Georgia, which is considered a battleground State for 
     control of the White House and U.S. Senate, the difficulty of 
     voting in Black communities like Union City could possibly 
     tip the results on November 3. With massive turnout expected, 
     lines could be even longer than they were for the primary, 
     despite a rise in mail-in voting and Georgians already 
     turning out by the hundreds of thousands to cast ballots 
     early.

  Since the U.S. Supreme Court's Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 
eliminated key federal oversight of election decisions in states with 
histories of discrimination, Georgia's voter rolls have grown by nearly 
2 million people, yet polling locations have been cut statewide by 
nearly 10%, [this is] according to an analysis of state and local 
records by Georgia Public Broadcasting and ProPublica. Much of the 
growth has been fueled by younger, nonwhite voters, especially in nine 
metro Atlanta counties, where four out of five new voters were 
nonwhite, according to the Georgia secretary of state's office.

       The metro Atlanta area has been hit particularly hard. The 
     nine counties--Fulton, Gwinnett, Forsyth, DeKalb, Cobb, Hall, 
     Cherokee, Henry and Clayton--have nearly half the state's 
     active voters but only 38% of the polling places, according 
     to the analysis.
       As a result, the average number of voters packed into each 
     polling location in those counties grew by nearly 40%, from 
     about 2,600 in 2012 to more than 3,600 per polling place as 
     of October 9. In addition, a last-minute push that opened 
     more than 90 polling places just weeks before the November 
     election has left many voters uncertain about where to vote 
     or how long they might have to wait to cast a ballot.
       The growth of registered voters has outstripped the number 
     of available polling places in both predominantly White and 
     Black neighborhoods. But the lines to vote have been longer 
     in Black areas, because Black voters are more likely than 
     Whites to cast their ballots in person on Election Day and 
     they are more reluctant to vote by mail, according to U.S. 
     census data and recent studies. Georgia Public Broadcasting/
     ProPublica found that about two-thirds of the polling places 
     that had to stay open late for the June primary to 
     accommodate waiting voters were in majority-Black 
     neighborhoods, even though those neighborhoods made up only 
     about one-third of the State's polling places.

  An analysis by Stanford University political science professor 
Jonathan Roddin of the data that was collected by the Georgia Public 
Broadcasting/ProPublica found that the average wait time after 7 p.m. 
across Georgia was 51 minutes in polling places that were 90% or more 
nonwhite.
  That is 51 minutes in polling places that were 90 percent or more 
non-White, but only 6 minutes in polling places that were 90 percent 
White.
  Georgia law sets a cap of 2,000 voters for a polling place that has 
experienced significant voter delays, but that limit is rarely, if 
ever, enforced. Our analysis found that, in both majority Black and 
majority White neighborhoods, about 9 out of every 10 precincts are 
assigned to polling places with more than 2,000 people.
  A June 2020 analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New 
York University Law Center found that the average number of voters 
assigned to a polling place has grown in the past 5 years in Georgia, 
Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina--all States with substantial 
Black populations that, before the Supreme Court's Shelby decision, 
needed Federal approval to close polling places under the Voting Rights 
Act, and though dozens of States have regulations on the size of voting 
precincts and polling places or the number of voting machines, the 
analysis found that many jurisdictions simply do not abide by them.
  Georgia's State leadership and election officials have largely 
ignored complaints about poll consolidations, even as they tout record 
growth in voter registration. As secretary of state from 2010 to 2018, 
when most of Georgia's poll closures occurred, Brian Kemp, now the 
Governor, took a laissez-faire attitude toward county-run election 
practices, save for a 2015 document that spelled out methods officials 
could use to shutter polling places to show ``how the change can 
benefit voters and the public interest.''
  Kemp's office declined to comment Thursday on the letter or as to why 
poll closures went unchallenged by State officials. His spokesperson 
referred to his previous statements that he did not encourage officials 
to close polling places but merely offered guidance on how to follow 
the law.
  The inaction has left Black voters in Georgia facing barriers 
reminiscent of Jim Crow laws, said Adrienne Jones, a political science 
professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who has studied the impact 
of the landmark Shelby decision on Black voters. Voter suppression ``is 
happening with these voter impediments that are being imposed,'' Jones 
said. ``You're closing down polling places so people have a more 
difficult time getting there. You're making vote-by-mail difficult or 
confusing. Now we're in court arguing about which ballots are going to 
be accepted, and it means that people have less trust in our state.''
  Despite false Republican claims to the contrary, voter ID laws 
disproportionately harm people of color, rural Americans, and poor 
Americans.
  I now want to read an article from ABC News. They published it on 
October 5, 2021. It tells the story of Texas voter ID laws, and it is 
entitled ``Black woman in rural Texas struggles with process to vote, 
advocates say system is unfair.''

       While voters across Texas submitted voter registration 
     applications on Monday, October 4, ahead of the Nov. 2 
     statewide election, 82-year-old Elmira Hicks worried she 
     would not be able to have her vote counted.
       The Oakwood, Texas, native said she hasn't been able to 
     renew her driver's license for more than a year because she 
     has been unable to present the required birth certificate 
     needed to verify her identity.
       In the Lone Star State, election laws require voters to 
     present a driver's license, passport, military identification 
     card, citizenship certificate, state election identification 
     certificate or a personal identification card to cast a 
     ballot in person.
       A person does not need an ID to register to vote, or to 
     vote by mail in the state of Texas.

[[Page S270]]

       For voters ages 70 and over, an otherwise valid form of ID 
     may be presented when casting a ballot, even if it's expired, 
     according to the office of the . . . Secretary of State.
       If a voter does not possess or cannot reasonably obtain one 
     of the seven acceptable forms of photo ID, the voter may file 
     a Reasonable Impediment Declaration and present a supporting 
     form of ID, [like] a bank statement, current utility bill, 
     paycheck or government check.
       Hicks and her daughter, Jonita White, said they were 
     unaware of the RID process, and that without a driver's 
     license and limited transportation, it's difficult for Hicks 
     to participate in state and federal elections.
       ``My voice does not count.'' Hicks told ABC News. ``It's 
     very important. People have died just to vote, people have 
     stood in line, in the rain, women fought to vote and now I 
     can't vote.''
       Like many Black elders in the South, Hicks was born at a 
     time when records weren't kept. She never had a birth 
     certificate. Her daughter has helped her apply for one. The 
     pair even went to court over the issue, and said a judge 
     ruled in their favor. Still, they said the Office of Vital 
     Statistics rejected Hicks because she filled out an outdated 
     form.
       ``I do feel like the laws right now are targeting my mother 
     and other African Americans in this country,'' White said.
       Eight state constitutional amendments ranging from taxes to 
     judicial eligibility will be up for a vote on Nov. 2, in an 
     election that, as of now, Hicks [cannot] participate in.
       Advocates warn that potentially thousands of predominantly 
     minority voters could be disenfranchised due to voter 
     identification requirements, which could have large 
     implications during next year's midterm elections for state 
     and congressional races.
       ``It's often very common for people of a certain age not to 
     have a birth certificate. I want to emphasize it's not as 
     uncommon as people might believe,'' said Franita Tolson, the 
     vice dean for faculty and academic affairs and a professor of 
     law at the University of Southern California Gould School of 
     Law.
       ``In this country, race correlates to a lot of different 
     characteristics. So, for example, if you take voter 
     identification laws . . . people of color, so African 
     Americans, Latinos, will be less likely to have the 
     underlying documents that you need in order to get the ID in 
     the first place in order to get a driver's license,'' Tolson 
     [said].
       Texas recently passed the Election Integrity Protection 
     Act, one of the most restrictive voting laws in the country. 
     It bans drive-thru voting, enlists new regulations for early 
     voting and enacts new ID requirements for mail-in voting.
       While Tolson does not believe all voter identification 
     requirements are discriminatory, she called Texas' voter ID 
     measures ``racist'' during a Congressional Subcommittee 
     hearing on September 22 because she believes they 
     disproportionately impact voters of color.
       ``Texas has very restrictive voter ID law,'' Tolson said. 
     ``If you read it, it doesn't seem racist on its face, but if 
     you think about how it operates in practice, as well as the 
     intent behind it, it is fairly racist. For example, Texas' 
     law only allows voters to have a certain limited amount of 
     IDs. You have to have a driver's license, you can have a . . 
     . handgun license, you can have a military ID, but you can't 
     have a federal ID, or you can't have a student ID, which are 
     types of IDs that people of color are more likely to have.''
       White said obtaining an election identification is not so 
     easy for an 82-year-old woman who lives in a rural area 
     without the convenient ability to drive herself to the 
     Department of Public Safety.
       ``My challenge is it's taking so long to get this done,'' 
     White said. ``And to send my mother through all of these 
     hoops at this age to go get documents notarized, to go get 
     her Social Security application, We're having to look for 
     high school records and baptism information . . . To send her 
     through such a process, it really is ridiculous.''

  Latino communities have also been at the forefront of the fight for 
social, racial, and economic justice, but Republican gerrymandering is 
silencing these communities as described in the following article, 
published by the Brennan Center, on November 14, 2021, entitled ``It's 
Time to Stop Gerrymandering Latinos out of Political Power.''

       In 2020, Latinos made up just 1 percent of all local and 
     federal elected officials, despite being 18 percent of the 
     population.
       In fact, the 2020 census results show that Latinos made up 
     over half the country's population growth from 2010 to 2020, 
     adding 11.6 million people to their total numbers--more by 
     far than any other ethnic group in absolute terms. Latinos 
     are already the largest minority group in 21 states, and in 
     California and New Mexico they have already surpassed non-
     Latino whites as the largest single ethnic group in the 
     state. In Texas, they are poised to do the same.
       In states where growth among Latinos and other people of 
     color threaten the political status quo, lawmakers are 
     already beginning to gerrymander Latino communities out of 
     their political voice, packing them into fewer and fewer 
     districts to circumscribe their electoral power or 
     dispersing Latino communities across multiple districts in 
     order to dilute their voting strength. In Texas, for 
     example, lawmakers recently passed a new congressional map 
     that reduced the number of Latino-majority districts--
     despite the fact that the state has actually added 2 
     million Latinos since 2010.
       This isn't a new tactic. Last decade, Texas failed to 
     create any new electoral opportunities for Latinos despite 
     rapid and concentrated Latino growth, leading to years of 
     drawn-out litigation over the discriminatory scheme. 
     Likewise, successful litigation in Florida demonstrated that 
     lawmakers packed Latino voters into already heavily 
     Democratic districts to shore up Republican districts at the 
     expense of Latino voters. Even in states under Democratic 
     control, like Illinois and Washington, Latinos are often 
     shuffled between different districts to bolster safe 
     Democratic seats and denied the equal opportunity to elect 
     representatives of their choice.
       Even with record turnout in 2020, Latino voters were, by 
     many accounts, neglected by Republican and Democratic 
     campaigns alike. This comes at a time when Latino communities 
     are in particular need of responsiveness from lawmakers. Over 
     the course of the pandemic, Latinos have been 2.8 times more 
     likely to die of COVID-19 and suffered more economic and job 
     losses than other Americans. And since the pandemic began, 
     Latino adults were more likely to get evicted and their 
     children more likely to fall behind in school than their 
     white peers.
       But rather than address the concerns and desires of this 
     growing body of constituents, many states, like Texas and 
     Florida, have instead created new barriers to the ballot box. 
     Anti-Latino redistricting practices are occurring amid the 
     biggest voter suppression push in decades--much of it aimed 
     at diminishing the growing power of Latino communities.
       These attacks on Latino voters have deep roots in 
     historical prejudice and violence going back over a century. 
     Often erased in U.S. history books, violent mobs are 
     estimated to have killed thousands of people of Mexican 
     descent in the early 20th century. Forgotten too is the 
     campaign by state and local officials to ``repatriate'' (that 
     is, forcibly move to Mexico) an estimated 2 million Mexican 
     Americans during the Great Depression, many of whom were U.S. 
     citizens. Later, even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 failed to 
     initially protect Puerto Ricans from English literacy tests 
     at the New York polls--``language minorities'' weren't 
     included in the law until 10 years after its passage.

  Though the Latino population has grown and grown more diverse over 
the past 50 years, the pattern of discrimination remains strikingly 
unchanged. Every day, lawmakers across the country are recycling the 
bad map-drawing practices that have stymied Latino political 
opportunity for decades. Voters and advocates can challenge these maps 
in court, but they will be hampered by courts' restrictive 
interpretation of voting rights laws and the ability for map drawers, 
after the Supreme Court green-lighted partisan gerrymandering, to claim 
that Latinas were targeted for partisan reasons, not for their 
ethnicity. And that is why it is more urgent than ever that Congress 
repair and strengthen the Nation's voting rights laws by passing the 
John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote 
Act.

  Asian-American voters are turning out at record levels, and it is no 
coincidence that Republican State legislatures are responding with new 
laws to suppress their voices.
  I will now read from an NBC News article from March 31, 2021, about 
the effect of Georgia's recently enacted voter suppression law on 
Asian-American voters. This is entitled ``Asian American voter rights 
in Georgia hit record high. How voting bill threatens progress.''

       While new data shows Asian Americans had record turnout in 
     Georgia in the last election, a new law that restricts voting 
     in the state threatens their participation in the political 
     process, particularly at a time when they also have the 
     highest rates of absentee voting, critics say.
       The new legislation, passed with the overwhelming support 
     of Republicans in the state Legislature last week, adds 
     restrictions to absentee and early voting, among other forms 
     of balloting. Critics say the law could disproportionately 
     affect communities of color, including Asian Americans, whose 
     voting population already confronts significant barriers to 
     civic engagement.
       The bill, activists say, is particularly alarming in light 
     of a recent analysis by the policy nonprofit AAPI Data on 
     turnout in battleground states that showed a historic 84 
     percent vote gain in Georgia by Asian Americans from 2016 to 
     2020--a result, in part, of aggressive community outreach.
       ``Voters of color, including Asian American voters, have 
     shown their electoral power in Georgia,'' Phi Nguyen, a 
     litigation director for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-
     Atlanta told NBC. . . . ``And now some elected leaders want 
     to try to suppress those voices rather than be accountable to 
     a diverse, multiracial, multiethnic electorate.''

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       Critics said that the bill--which was fast tracked through 
     the state House and Senate and signed by Republican Gov. 
     Brian Kemp in just over an hour--was passed without public 
     notice to advocates or voters. The sweeping legislation 
     criminalizes ``line warming,'' the practice of offering food 
     and water to voters waiting to vote, and allows the Georgia 
     Legislature to take power from local boards of election.
       In regards to absentee and early voting, the earliest date 
     a voter can request a ballot is 11 weeks ahead of an 
     election, less than half the time before the law [before the 
     law was passed]. And the deadline to complete the ballots has 
     been moved up as well. Both requesting and returning ballots 
     requires identification, such as a driver's license number, 
     state ID number or a copy of an acceptable voter ID.
       The restrictions on absentee voting, Nguyen said, are 
     particularly concerning given that Asian Americans voted by 
     mail at the highest rate compared to all other racial groups 
     in the general election. Voting data from November showed 
     that in 13 of the most contested battleground states, 
     including Georgia, AAPI early and absentee voting rose almost 
     300 percent from 2016 [to 2020].
       Nguyen further pointed out that any laws that make voting 
     more challenging have a particularly amplified impact on 
     those who are limited English proficient, or people who have 
     difficulty communicating in English. The Asian American 
     population has some of the highest rates of limited English 
     proficiency. And according to Pew Research, Asian Americans 
     are the only group made up of a majority of naturalized 
     immigrants, who account for two-thirds of the electorate.
       With a high immigrant population, Asian Americans face 
     barriers beyond just language, Karthick Ramakrishnan, [an] 
     associate dean [for] the University of California Riverside 
     School of Public Policy and founder of AAPI Data, said. 
     Because the majority of the electorate is foreign born, most 
     Asian Americans most likely did not grow up in a [Democratic] 
     or [a] Republican household, he said. For those who were able 
     to get college degrees, they probably attended universities 
     in their home country, which influenced their knowledge of 
     the political process.
       ``What that means is that the political awakening and 
     consciousness and even information about where the party 
     stands on issues and where candidates stand on issues--the 
     barriers are pretty high beyond the language barriers,'' he 
     said. ``You combine that with the fact that parties and 
     candidates traditionally have not reached out to them. It's 
     asking a lot for someone to make a decision when they don't 
     have all that background information, and no one is reaching 
     out to them.''
       Given the added work that is required by immigrants to seek 
     out this information, Nguyen noted that ``they are more 
     likely to give up or feel intimidated in the face of 
     additional hurdles or hoops.''
       Within the Asian American community, those who tend to vote 
     at higher rates also tend to be more proficient in English, 
     and have higher incomes and higher education. . . . Many are 
     also homeowners as opposed to renters. Voter suppression laws 
     . . . would result in a distorted representation of the Asian 
     American population.
       ``All of these factors matter. . . . They 
     disproportionately hurt populations that are lower income, 
     lower education, renters, younger people''. . . . ``You get a 
     skew in terms of communities of color less likely to be 
     represented. Even within those communities you will get a 
     class skew and an age skew in terms of who has a voice.'' . . 
     .
       Ultimately, people should be pushing for more ways to make 
     voting easier and pull more people toward civic engagement . 
     . . adding that even if lawmakers are genuinely concerned 
     about voter fraud, it occurs far more infrequently than voter 
     suppression, of which there are widespread examples.
       Previous research suggests that there is little to no voter 
     fraud and a Harvard study on double voting, one of the most 
     frequently cited examples of fraud, suggests . . . it's ``not 
     . . . carried out in such a systematic way that it presents a 
     threat to the integrity of American elections.''
       ``This is a serious reminder of how important political and 
     civic education is for our most vulnerable communities.''

  For far too long, Native communities have faced massive challenges in 
exercising their right to vote. Voter suppression efforts in Montana, 
as illustrated by this Mic article from July 6, 2021, are just one 
example of recent efforts to disenfranchise Native voters. The article 
is entitled ``Montana is ground zero for Native American voter 
suppression--and the fight against it.''
  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned discriminatory voting practices 
and gave Native American communities the right to vote, in theory. Most 
of us know now that even with the Voting Rights Act in place, voter 
suppression is still going strong. In Montana, Native Americans are 
fighting new Republican laws that further restrict their ability to 
vote.
  This year, Montana Democratic Governor Steve Bullock, who served for 
8 years, was replaced by Republican Greg Gianforte. With a Democrat no 
longer holding veto power, State Republicans took advantage of the 
Governor's election by passing two new voting law bills--house bill 
176, which eliminates same-day voter registration, and house bill 530, 
which makes it illegal for people to distribute or collect mail-in 
ballots if they are being paid to do so.
  Per the National Congress of American Indians, the turnout rate 
amongst Native voters is up to 10 percentage points lower than any 
other racial group. In 2019, the Brennan Center reported that 
restrictive voting laws throughout the country continued to 
disproportionately impact Native communities.

  On the surface, preventing people from being paid to collect ballots 
might seem like an OK idea, but in Montana, local nonprofits like 
Western Native Voice and Montana Native Voice pay people to collect and 
distribute ballots as an important part of their voting strategy. 
Without this practice, many people would be unable to cast their 
ballots at all.
  For example, the New York Times reported the story of Laura Roudine, 
a resident of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, who had emergency open-
heart surgery only a week before the 2020 election. Because of the 
risks that coronavirus posed, neither Roudine nor her husband could 
vote in person. Home delivery wasn't an option either because it 
doesn't exist in her area of the reservation. Instead, the Times 
reported, the couple relied on Renee LaPlant, a Blackfeet community 
organizer with Western Native Voice, who took applications and ballots 
back and forth between their home and one of the only two satellite 
election offices located on the 2,300-square-mile reservation. The new 
laws signed by Gianforte would make this practice illegal.
  Native American communities in Montana are organizing against these 
voter suppression efforts. In May, the ACLU of Montana and the Native 
American Rights Fund sued on behalf of several Native voting rights 
organizations and four Montana Tribal communities, stating that the new 
laws will disenfranchise Native voters in the State.
  I know I am running low on time. I will not be able to speak to the 
question of the student vote and how Republican legislatures are doing 
all they can to keep young voters from voting because they are more 
likely to vote Democratic or to speak on felon disenfranchisement and 
what that means in our democracy. I am not able to speak on these, but 
it does not mean that I do not think they are important; it just 
reminds us of the magnitude of this problem.
  Voter suppression laws have devastating consequences for real 
Americans every day, so I want to conclude my remarks today with the 
story of Crystal Mason, which is told in the New York Times on April 6, 
2021, in an article entitled ``Crystal Mason Was Sentenced to Five 
Years Behind Bars Because She Voted.''

       Whenever you hear Republican rants about widespread voter 
     fraud supposedly undermining Americans' faith in the 
     integrity of their elections, remember the story of Crystal 
     Mason.
       Ms. Mason, a 46-year-old grandmother from the Fort Worth 
     area, has been in the news off and on since 2016, when Texas 
     prosecutors decided she was a vote fraudster so dangerous 
     that justice demanded she be sentenced to five years behind 
     bars.
       Her offense? Visiting her local precinct on Election Day 
     that year and casting a provisional ballot for president. Ms. 
     Mason was not eligible to vote at the time because she was on 
     supervised release after serving a prison term for federal 
     tax fraud. Texas, like many states, bars those with criminal 
     records from voting until they have finished all terms of 
     their sentence.
       Ms. Mason, who had only recently returned home to her three 
     children and had gone to the polls that day at the urging of 
     her mother, said she did not realize she wasn't allowed to 
     cast a ballot. When poll workers couldn't find her name on 
     the rolls, they assumed it was a clerical error and suggested 
     she fill out the provisional ballot.
       Provisional ballots are a useful way to deal with questions 
     about a voter's eligibility that can't be resolved at the 
     polling place. Since 2002, Congress has required that states 
     offer them as part of the Help America Vote Act, a law passed 
     in the aftermath of the 2000 election debacle, when millions 
     of ballots were disqualified. Ms. Mason's ballot was rejected 
     as soon as the search of the database determined that she was 
     ineligible. In other words, the system worked the way it was 
     intended to.
       Tarrant County prosecutors went after her for illegal 
     voting anyway. They said she

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     should have known she was not allowed to vote. The state had 
     sent her a letter telling her so back in 2012, shortly after 
     she had been sentenced in the tax fraud case. The letter was 
     delivered to her home even though she had already begun 
     serving her sentence behind bars. ``They sent it to the one 
     place they knew she was not going to be,'' said Alison 
     Grinter, Ms. Mason's lawyer.
       The prosecutors also pointed out that when she cast her 
     ballot in 2016, she signed an affidavit [saying] that she had 
     completed all the terms of her sentence.
       Ms. Mason said she had not read the fine print; she was 
     focused on writing down her address in exactly the form it 
     appeared on her driver's license. She was convicted after a 
     one-day trial and sentenced to five years behind bars for 
     casting a ballot that was never counted.
       ``It's a surreal experience to be in a courtroom for these 
     trials,'' said Christopher Uggen, a professor of law and 
     sociology at the University of Minnesota who has studied the 
     impact of felon disenfranchisement for decades, and has 
     testified as an expert in prosecutions of people charged with 
     illegal voting.
       ``You've got the judges, you've got the lawyers. You've got 
     somebody who often is a model probationer called in, and 
     what's at issue is whether they voted. I have overriding 
     sense of, gosh, don't we have other crimes to prosecute? It 
     really should be a consensus issue in a democracy that we 
     don't incarcerate people for voting.''
       Mr. Uggen said that there is a stronger case for criminal 
     punishment of certain election-law offenses like campaign-
     finance violations or sabotaging voting machines, that can do 
     more widespread damage to our election system. But in his own 
     work he has found that the people who get punished are more 
     likely to fit Ms. Mason's description: female, low-level 
     offenders who are doing relatively well in the community. 
     ``These are not typically folks who represent some great 
     threat to public safety,'' he said.
       You wouldn't get that sense from how Ms. Mason has been 
     treated. After her voting conviction, a federal judge found 
     she had violated the terms of her supervised release, and 
     sentenced her to 10 extra months behind bars. That 
     punishment, which she began serving in December 2018, earned 
     her no credit toward her five-year state sentence.
       Ms. Mason has continued to fight her case, but so far she 
     has lost at every step. In March 2020, a three-judge panel on 
     a state appellate court rejected her challenge to her 
     sentence. The court reasoned that she broke the law simply by 
     trying to vote while knowing she was on supervised release. 
     It didn't matter whether she knew that Texas prohibits voting 
     by people in that circumstance.
       This appears to be a clear misapplication of Texas election 
     law, which criminalizes voting only by people who actually 
     know they are not eligible, not those who, like Ms. Mason, 
     mistakenly believe that they are. It's as though Ms. Mason 
     had asked a police officer what the local speed limit was, 
     and he responded: ``Beat's me. Why don't you start driving 
     and see if we pull you over?''
       Last week, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state's 
     highest court for criminal cases, agreed to rule on Ms. 
     Mason's appeal. It's her last chance to avoid prison for 
     voting. Tossing her conviction would bring a small measure of 
     justice to a woman whose punishment should have been limited 
     to, at most, not being able to cast a ballot.
       But it wouldn't give her back the last four years of fear 
     and uncertainty she has endured for no good reason. Ms. 
     Mason's first grandchild was born a few months ago, another 
     reminder of how much she would miss if she were to lose the 
     appeal and end up back behind bars. ``This is very 
     overwhelming, waking up every day knowing that prison is on 
     the line, trying to maintain a smile on your face in front of 
     your kids and you don't know the outcome,'' Ms. Mason told 
     The Times in an interview. ``Your future is in someone else's 
     hands because of a simple error.''
       Identifying errors like these is the whole point of 
     offering provisional ballots: The crazy quilt of voting rules 
     and regulations that Americans face from state to state can 
     trip up even the best-informed voters, and honest mistakes 
     are common. By prosecuting Ms. Mason, just one of more than 
     44,000 Texans whose provisional ballot in 2016 was found to 
     be ineligible, the state is saying that you attempt to 
     participate in democracy at your own risk.
       That risk is almost always higher for people of color. 
     Texas' attorney general, Ken Paxton, likes to brag about the 
     155 people his office has successfully prosecuted for 
     election fraud in the last 16 years--an average of fewer than 
     10 per year. What he doesn't say out loud is what the 
     A.C.L.U. of Texas found in an analysis of the cases he has 
     prosecuted: almost three-quarters [of those cases] involved 
     Black or Latino defendants, and nearly half involved woman of 
     color, like Ms. Mason.
       At this point you might be wondering why Ms. Mason was 
     ineligible to vote in the first place. She had been released 
     from prison, after all, and was trying to work her way back 
     into society. As more states are coming to understand, there 
     is no good argument for denying the vote to people with a 
     criminal record, and that's before you consider the 
     practice's explicitly racist roots. There is even a strong 
     case to be made for letting those in prison vote, as Maine, 
     Vermont and most Western European countries do. And yet 
     today, more than five million Americans, including Ms. Mason, 
     are unable to vote because of a criminal conviction. That has 
     a far greater impact on state and national elections than any 
     voter fraud that has ever been uncovered.
       Given the disproportionate number of Black and brown people 
     caught up in the criminal justice system, it's not hard to 
     see a connection between cases like Ms. Mason's and the 
     broader Republican war on voting, which so often targets 
     people who look like her. The nation's tolerance of 
     prosecutions for the act of casting a ballot reveals 
     complacency about the right to vote, Mr. Uggen said, and a 
     troubling degree of comfort with voting restrictions 
     generally. ``There's a slippery slope: If you start exempting 
     individuals from the franchise, it's easy to exempt other 
     individuals by defining them outside the citizenry,'' he 
     said. ``What is shocking to me is that people view this as 
     acceptable in a political system that calls itself a 
     democracy.''

  Mr. President, these efforts to subvert our democracy cannot be 
allowed to stand. Congress must pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis 
Act immediately to protect free and fair elections across this Nation. 
And if Senate Republicans will not join us, then we must reform the 
filibuster. We must pass this vital legislation. Our democracy depends 
on it.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Merkley). The Senator from Massachusetts.

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