[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 48 (Tuesday, March 17, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1156-S1158]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SAVE AMERICA ACT
Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the skill and the passion that
my friend and colleague the distinguished Senator from the State of
Washington brings to the table on this. I appreciate her thoroughness
in making the case that she has made to the Senate. I would like to
address a few of those items which I think call for a response.
One of the arguments that she points to--all of the arguments that
she points to in one way or another--reminds me of how important it is
to turn back to the central objective of what we are trying to achieve
here: Let's make it easy to vote but hard to cheat.
Again and again, she refers to the desire to make it easy to vote,
but as to the ``hard to cheat'' point, she goes off on a number of
tangents, and I would like to address a number of those right now to
make sure we set the record clear.
One of the arguments she makes right out of the gate has to do with
the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right, and she is
right there. We have a number of freestanding constitutional
protections in various parts of the Constitution that protect your
right to vote.
The fact that it is a constitutionally protected right doesn't mean
that it doesn't matter that we make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
In fact, it makes it that much more important to do it.
The fact that something is a constitutionally protected right doesn't
mean that it has to be uninhibited. In fact, very often, as is the case
with voting, if we make it easy to cheat, then your constitutionally
protected right to vote will mean less and less with each passing
election, and our failure to take these risks seriously further
undermines the public's perception of the legitimacy of the rights in
question.
Now, the mere fact that something is a constitutionally protected
right doesn't mean you can't make it harder for people to break the law
in gaining access to it. Otherwise, there would be all sorts of things
that would be off in our society.
Take for example the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. Yes,
we
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have a constitutionally protected right to bear arms, and it is a
fundamental right that is available to individuals. Yet, when you
decide to exercise that right by going into a federally licensed
firearms dealer to purchase a firearm, guess what you have to do? You
have to produce identification, and you have to wait a period of time.
It might take a few minutes or it might take a few hours, but you have
to wait until they run your identification and your information through
some databases to make sure you are eligible to purchase a gun. It
still is a constitutionally protected right. It doesn't cease to be a
constitutionally protected right simply by virtue of doing that.
Never in a million years would you see my colleagues on the other
side of the aisle or many in my party, I assume, saying: OK. This is
all we need to do in order to deal with this issue since the right to
bear arms is protected by the Constitution.
Yes, we have laws about who may purchase what firearm and when and
under what circumstance and when they might be disqualified based on a
prior conviction or otherwise from purchasing a firearm. All we need is
a signature because, according to my colleague's logic, a signature is
all the identification you need.
Well, is it? Well, signatures can be forged. With increasing ease,
they can be forged. In other circumstances, they can be presumed not to
be checked, and in some cases, that might pan out to be more true than
in others.
But nobody would seriously suggest--particularly those who like these
background check laws--they wouldn't be content with somebody just
signing their name even if it said: I hereby declare under penalty of
perjury that I am entitled to purchase this firearm, that I am an
adult, that I am a U.S. citizen, and that I have not been convicted of
a felony offense which would disqualify me under 18 USC section 922(g);
nor do I trigger any of the other exclusionary factors articulated in
various subsections of 922(g) or under any other Federal law.
The signature wouldn't do it there, and that is a constitutionally
protected right.
This is a constitutionally protected right, but we are still making
it, yes, easy to vote and hard to cheat. You have to have both. You
don't get that if you have a mere signature.
It is so, too, with the purchase of alcohol or tobacco by minors.
Even if you had people sign something saying, ``I hereby attest by
signing this under penalty of perjury that I am, in fact, entitled to
purchase alcohol; I am, in fact, at least 21 years old''--we wouldn't
do that. Why? Well, it would be really hard to enforce the law at that
point.
When we turn to the examples--and I tried to count the number of
times she said it, but I think she said ``very, very, very, very, very,
very, very little fraud in elections.'' OK. I understand that. Election
fraud is extremely difficult to detect and therefore is rarely
prosecuted. There have been very few cases of voter fraud actually
having been discovered--detected--and prosecuted through to completion.
Well, likewise, with other laws, if all you were required to do was to
check a box and sign your name, there would be a lot of other instances
of legal wrongdoing that would also be very hard to detect if that
would be all you had to provide.
We have this known vulnerability in our laws here, and Heaven help us
all if we don't acknowledge the vulnerabilities that we face and take
reasonable steps to close those loopholes.
The fact that we are requiring documents here--yes, it adds a step.
Now, there are a couple of things I need to be clear about.
No. 1, if you are already registered to vote, this doesn't undo your
existing voter registration. We are not going to make hundreds of
millions of Americans who are already registered to vote go back and
start the process over again--that wouldn't make any sense--but it
would apply to new voter registrations. If you move or if you register
to vote in a new State or a new precinct and you have to establish a
new voter registration file after this becomes law, then, yes, you
would have to do that.
But, again, if you are an American who has ever had a job anywhere or
who has started any new job at any point in your career with a new
employer, you have already had to supply the same documentation. In
fact, you have had to supply a much more rigid set of documents than
what this requires because this, unlike that, allows you to prove it
even if you have not a single document--not a single one of those.
Again, going back to page 12, line 22, and the sentences and
paragraphs that follow, it makes it abundantly clear. Even if you are
missing all of it, we have taken that into account, and we can put the
onus back on the State to go back and prove you wrong. That is very
different than just checking a box and signing your name.
Even if it does have some warnings attached to it, that is very
different than having to supply the necessary information about how and
where you were born. If you are a natural-born citizen, meaning if you
were a U.S. citizen as of the moment of your birth, based on the
circumstances surrounding your birth--either born on U.S. soil or born
elsewhere to U.S. citizen parents--then you have to establish that.
That is very different than simply checking a box and signing your
name.
Yes, signing your name can be used to identify a person under some
circumstances, but it is a lot less information than we are required to
provide elsewhere.
She then makes this about what she refers to as States' rights. I
don't like to use that term because I think it is a misnomer. It also
conjures images of a bygone Jim Crow era in which the Democratic Party
subjected substantial swaths of the American population to a set of
racist, evil, exclusionary laws. It has a George Wallace connotation to
it that I don't like.
Besides that, States don't have rights; they have authority.
``Authority'' is sort of the inverse polar opposite of a right. It is
the ying to the yang that is a right. States have authority; people
have rights. Rights are a check on authority, and that is what we are
talking about here.
Regardless of whatever you want to call that--State sovereign
authority, federalism, whatever you want to call it--it is not
implicated here.
Remember, this objection is coming from the same party that, no less
than 5 years ago, through a vehicle that, in the Congress empaneled
between 2021 and 2023, was run by Democrats during a Democratic
administration, under the auspices of a bill commonly known at the time
as H.R. 1, tried to undertake a wholesale takeover of our Federal
voting and election system.
Among other things, it would have subjected every voting jurisdiction
in the United States to the status that today we equate only with
section 5 jurisdictions. What that means is, anytime any voting
jurisdiction in the United States anywhere--no matter how large or
small, whether Tribal, local, State, or otherwise--wanted to
redistrict, they would have to go to a political appointee at the U.S.
Department of Justice and obtain preclearance. It is a ``Mother, may
I?'' of sorts from Uncle Sam and Aunt Sam. It is something that is as
fundamentally un-American, something as fundamentally contrary to
federalism as we know it. This is the same party that is now making the
federalism objection to this.
While we are on this Federal objection to this, let's remember the
whole reason this is necessary in the first place is because of an
existing Federal law passed in 1993 by Congress--the National Voter
Registration Act. So the whole reason it is necessary to begin with is
because of an existing Federal law.
Don't tell me this is an insult to federalism, especially if you are
one of those people from that party who supported a wholesale takeover
of our entire electoral system as recently as 4 or 5 years ago.
None of us should be surprised that leftist media establishments in
the mainstream news media have come out against this because, let's
face it, they are leftists; they are hardcore Democrats. Of course they
don't want this, and of course they use this inflammatory language in
their headlines.
``Ah, this is a threat to our democracy everywhere.'' ``This will
disenfranchise 21 million American voters.'' Do you want to change that
sentence to make it correct? Well, it could
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be a whole lot of people who are not citizens. The only people we don't
want voting are those who are not citizens and are not eligible to
vote. That is all this does--easy to vote, hard to cheat--using
documentary standards that are far more generous, far more flexible,
and far more easy to comply with than any other system we have access
to.
You can still do it. You can still satisfy this standard of proving
citizenship even if all your documents have suddenly disappeared. You
supply the necessary information under oath, under penalty of perjury,
and then it becomes the State's burden to either confirm or refute
those things, but with this specificity, we find it a lot easier to
prevent fraud.
As far as chilling voter activity, we have data from a number of
different studies showing that in States that have adopted voter ID
laws, you don't drive down voter participation. In some cases, it goes
up. It works out perfectly well.
We need not, we ought not, we must not fear this. If we fear this
particular issue, we risk running afoul of that which we hold most dear
about our electoral system.
Sometimes we get confused about what we ought to fear. We see this in
nature. We fear the snake. We don't fear the deer. Yet, a few years
ago, my wife and I were having this conversation. I don't know how we
got off on this tangent, but we decided to look up your chances of
dying as a result of an interaction with a rattlesnake as compared to
your chances of dying as a result of an interaction with a deer.
Now, deer are cute. Who doesn't love Bambi and Bambi's mom and
Bambi's dad? You know, it is all so great.
Your chances are way higher of being killed by Bambi than they are by
a rattlesnake. Yet we fear the rattlesnake because it is creepy and it
is scary.
When we fear the wrong things, we leave ourselves vulnerable to that
which can harm us.
And perhaps we don't fear enough what happens when our elections lose
their credibility because we don't take reasonable safeguards to make
sure that only those who are legally entitled to vote in them are, in
fact, allowed to vote.
So as far as the private right of action goes, that private right of
action exists under previously enacted laws. I believe that one applies
as a result of the original NVRA, and, possibly, some of it could be
under the Help America Vote Act. But there are existing Federal laws
that make that exact private right of action available, and all this
does is it extends it to the obligations that arise under the SAVE
America Act.
And those, too, are generous. They are generous to those State
officials that are complying with them. If somebody identifies a
problem with the way that the law is being implemented, if they are not
complying with the terms of the SAVE America Act, there is a notice
requirement to the State elections official in question. And it gives a
certain period of time. I don't remember whether it is 30, 60, or 90
days. I think some of it may depend on the exact context. They have the
ability to cure the harm or make the argument back as to why they are
not, in fact, violating it.
So there is nothing scary about this private right of action. It is
just a way of, without growing the bureaucracy, making sure that there
is a means by which you can procure a court order requiring compliance
with the law so that it doesn't become dead letter.
Look, on personal information--the Department of Homeland Security
wielding personal information--well, if that is the case, there are all
kinds of things. And if that is on the table--I mean, a lot of
Americans don't much like how much personal information the IRS has,
and that gets leaked sometimes. A lot of people don't like how much
personal information can be found in the databases that are used in
connection with the background checks that one has to go through when
purchasing a gun.
That is just the beginning of it. There are all kinds of things where
people are not comfortable with the government having access to too
much information. Look, I get it. I am one of those people. I don't
like it either.
But the fact is the government does have that information. Why not
allow the government to use that information lawfully to make sure that
those who have a particular right are the only ones who are allowed to
wield it, so that it doesn't get cheapened or diluted or bastardized by
those who would flagrantly violate the law.
At the end of the day, this is, in fact, about making it easy to vote
and hard to cheat.
The Democrats in this Chamber seem, so far, to be very comfortable
with the first half of that equation but not the second half. We have
to pay attention to both. We ignore either to our own detriment and the
detriment of those we represent.
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