[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 105 (Tuesday, June 23, 2026)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3031-S3033]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             VOTING RIGHTS

  Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, the attack on vote by mail and other 
efforts to disenfranchise Americans, whether it is the SAVE Act or 
redistricting to take away representation from minority-majority 
districts as the result of the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v 
Callais--all of these are actions to take away the right to vote.
  Voting in America is a right. It is your right to vote. And for too 
long, that precious right has been denied to too many. Americans have 
been beaten, they have been bloodied, and some have given their lives 
just to secure this right to vote. Women had to fight for it in 1920. 
It is amazing that I stand here today, just a little over 100 years 
later, but 100 years ago, I would not even have been allowed to vote.
  Wars have been fought to preserve it. My father and uncle both fought 
in World War II, and I guarantee you they were fighting for our right 
to vote. And even in this Chamber, we had to fight to preserve and 
certify the 2020 election. So when we are talking about voting rights, 
we are not talking about an abstract idea.
  In Pennsylvania, in 1871, a man named Octavius Catto walked towards a 
polling place in the city of Philadelphia. He was a Black educator, a 
Civil War militia officer, and a respected civic leader.
  He believed that the promise written into our Constitution after the 
Civil War, the promise that Black Americans would be citizens and 
voters ought to mean something--that in the streets of his own city, he 
could cast a vote. On election day, he thought that is what citizens 
were supposed to do.
  So he went to vote. He never came home. He was gunned down in broad 
daylight by a White assailant amid a storm of racially charged violence 
designed to drive Black voters away from the polling place.
  His killing was not random. It was part of a campaign of terror, a 
message to every Black citizen: If you dare to exercise your political 
power, if you dare to walk to that ballot box, you will pay with your 
life.
  Nearly a century later, in Mississippi, in 1966, the tactics had 
changed, but the target was the same: Black Americans who insisted on 
their right to vote. Vernon Dahmer, Sr., was a Black farmer and 
businessman. If he dared to exercise his rights, what would happen?
  Black Americans insisted on their vote, and Dahmer was a Black farmer 
who led his local NAACP branch and understood that a poll tax, a fee 
that poor people could not afford, was being used as a weapon to keep 
Black people off the voting rolls.
  So he made a simple, courageous pledge: No one would be denied the 
chance to register because they could not afford to pay the tax. He 
went on radio and told the people of Mississippi that he would 
personally help pay their poll tax at his store.
  The response was not a policy debate; it was terror. In January of 
that year, the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his home while his family slept 
inside. Vernon Dahmer fought back long enough to get his wife and 
children to safety, but he did not survive.
  He died from the burns and smoke inhalation because he had taken a 
public stand that poor Black citizens should be allowed to be 
registered and vote. And while bombs and bullets are no longer used 
today, the intent to silence certain voters has not disappeared; it has 
just changed form.
  Disenfranchisement today is more bureaucratic, it is more technical, 
but the results for ordinary citizens can be the same. Their voices are 
shunned out of a democracy. In Texas in 2021, a new law, SB 1, rewrote 
the rules for voting by mail. It required voters to provide specific ID 
numbers on applications and ballot envelopes.
  The rules were confusing, the process was unforgiving, and in the 
next primary, thousands of longtime voters,

[[Page S3032]]

many of them elderly, disabled, or from communities of color, found 
that their ballot requests or their ballots themselves were rejected--
not because they were ineligible, but really because a form and the 
number on the form did not match.
  Researchers working at the Brennan Center describe one such voter, a 
Texan in her 70s. She had done exactly what was asked: She had voted by 
mail reliably in 2016 and 2018 and in the 2020 general election. She 
had played by the rules as they were explained to her. Then, under the 
new law, her 2022 ballot was rejected.
  No one threatened her at the polls with a gun. No one burned her 
home, but instead, a letter, a notice informed her that her ballot did 
not count. Her voice had been quietly erased. And now, we know that 
voters in her situation are far less likely to turn out in the next 
election.
  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was necessary because a century after 
the 15th Amendment, voters of color were still systematically blocked 
from ballots or facing literary tests, poll taxes, or just plain 
intimidation.
  Before 1965, Southern States in particular used these tactics to 
ensure that Black citizens would not register to vote everywhere where 
they were the majority of the population. The Voting Rights Act was 
needed because early civil rights laws had proven too weak.
  Congress needed to say explicitly, in those laws, what the courts and 
what we needed to affirm. Congress said the Federal Government should 
oversee elections as it relates to preclearance of voting changes in 
those States with discriminatory histories, places of discrimination.
  Why was this important? Just like all civil liberties that aren't 
implemented by the States, yes, the Federal Government should step in 
and make sure your civil rights and civil liberties are upheld, but 
some people here in this body don't believe in implementing those. And 
even though the Senate--this body--reauthorized the Voting Rights Act 
by a vote of 98 to 0 in 2006, the Supreme Court has eroded the gains of 
the Voting Rights Act over the last decade.
  So why are we here fighting today? Because today, Democrats are 
opposed to an unconstitutional Executive order, a U.S. Postal Service 
rulemaking on mail-in and absentee ballots, and other efforts by the 
administration to enable the Federal Government to seize control over 
voter rolls and the vote by mail system.
  The administration's actions are unconstitutional. Article I, section 
4 of the Constitution gives the States the primary responsibility of 
administering the elections. Congress has the secondary role. The 
President has no role. The Framers of the Constitution were deliberate 
about this. The Constitution entrusts the elections to the States, so 
that they can't be manipulated by a self-interested executive branch.
  In the State of Washington, on a bipartisan basis, vote by mail was 
implemented more than 40 years ago. By 2011, the State legislature made 
vote by mail the statewide standard of all elections, and yes, we are 
talking about a lot of Western States that are in the same boat. 
Washington was second only to Oregon, which adopted universal vote by 
mail in 1998.
  Today, there are 36 States that use no-excuse vote by mail. That 
means 36 States say you can get a ballot to cast your vote, and you 
don't have to make up an excuse, like you are working or in the 
hospital or are going to be out of the country. You can just request a 
mail-in ballot. In 2024, among people voting for President in South 
Dakota, 35.6 percent voted by mail. In Indiana, the number was 53 
percent voting by mail, and in Utah, over 91 percent of people voted by 
mail in 2024. I don't remember President Trump questioning the results 
of those elections.

  The fact is, many election officials in these States are calling on 
other States to adopt this very secure, very traceable voting system. 
Voting by mail is not only convenient; it actually encourages civic 
participation.
  Research by the University of Southern California found that 
universal vote by mail increased turnouts among registered voters by 
5.6 percent in the 2020 election. Other research shows that these 
numbers could be somewhere between 4 and 10 percent for seniors and the 
disabled.
  So giving people the right to vote is actually helping, and it is no 
surprise that 40 percent of seniors are voting by mail--but somehow we 
want to disenfranchise them? In the 2024 President election, 47 million 
people, about 1 in 3 U.S. citizens, cast their ballots by mail, and 40 
percent of the Americans 65 and older did so, the highest rate of any 
group.
  So we have already said it is safe, it is secure, it is reliable, and 
among the 89,991,893 ballots cast in my State from 2008 to 2025--so 
really a 16-year period of time--the Heritage Foundation only found 5 
cases of voter fraud, 5 cases in 16 years. In the State of Washington, 
we verify every voter, every election, with 100-percent signature 
matching bar codes, a paper trail, and an ID number if you want to 
track it yourself.
  But last December, the U.S. Postal Service changed the location where 
your mail is postmarked. Instead of postmarking your mail where you 
drop it off at the post office, your mail isn't postmarked until it is 
processed at a regional distribution center. This can delay postmarking 
up to several days.
  For example, following the changes in the postmark practices, the 
secretary of the State of Washington is seeing increased numbers of 
return ballots being rejected for late postmarks. For example, during 
the 2026 February special election, 75 percent of the total rejected 
ballots were due to late postmarks.
  Snohomish County, WA, recently conducted a test to assess the postal 
delivery times in their area. This was a small test: four dates in 
January and February during a special election, a tiny sample of voters 
in one county, but of the sample ballots mailed, only about 20 percent 
were postmarked on the day they were actually mailed--20 percent.
  Are we saying we are going to allow voters who vote by mail to be 
disenfranchised because this administration is trying to force the 
Postal Service to say they are not going to stamp your ballot on the 
date that you mail it at the post office?
  What about your Social Security check? What about other things that 
you would like to see postmarked the day they are mailed? What about 
legal documents? What about other issues? No. We are promulgating here 
a story of mischief that doesn't need to be here to suppress voters on 
election day.
  Only about half of the 15 test mailings were postmarked that election 
day. The Postal Service issued a proposed rule to take control of who 
can receive a ballot and whose vote will be counted if you vote by 
mail. This is preposterous.
  They want to use a Department of Homeland Security database notorious 
for erroneously finding eligible voters to be ineligible. That is 
right. That is what can happen to you: All of a sudden, now your name 
is on a database, and you are ineligible, even though you are really 
eligible.
  On election day in Snohomish, about half of the postmarks were 
postmarked that day. Let me say this again: The post office is 
reasserting it can decide who gets a ballot, and they would decide who 
can cast a ballot by mail.
  Fortunately, yesterday, a Federal court blocked the use of the DHS 
database, at least for now, as a violation of every American's privacy, 
but that litigation is continuing, and yesterday, the Postal Service 
declined to provide a witness to testify in the State of Washington at 
our State legislative committee about this issue.
  Why? If you are so proud of these tactics, if you think they are so 
great, why don't you show up at the Washington State Legislature and 
testify about what is happening? With the administration's plan, if you 
are among \1/3\ of Americans that vote by mail, you can never know 
whether your vote was counted. There is no recourse.
  I ask my colleagues: This is an assault on your right to vote. This 
is an assault on having your voice heard, whether it is a new rule 
delaying when mail is postmarked or prohibiting counting ballots 
received later than election day, whether it is demanding the DHS 
continue to purge names, they just want to take your rights away.
  Last week, over 100 FBI agents raided the Ohio voting rights group 
the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, searching

[[Page S3033]]

their offices, taking computers, knocking on the doors of volunteers 
without subpoenas.
  A few days later, the FBI went after one of the Nation's leading 
nonprofit voter outreach coordination hubs, America Votes, a DC-based 
organization that works to turn out voters nationwide. They went after 
America Votes because it is among the voter organization that funds the 
Ohio Organizing Collaborative. America Votes works with 400 
organizations, including the AFL-CIO, Human Rights Campaign, Planned 
Parenthood, Emily's List, and the American Federation of Teachers to 
educate voters and get out the votes. It is an outrage that Kash Patel 
is sending FBI agents to intimidate advocacy groups that work hard to 
turn out voters, particularly those of color.
  My family has always fought to get out the vote. My parents lived and 
worked alongside people like Robert F. Kennedy and knew of Martin 
Luther King's voice. Martin Luther King, Jr., on a trip to Seattle, 
said: Are we going to be ``an echo rather than a voice, a taillight 
instead of a headlight''?
  When I think about what we are seeing today, I see the same thing for 
my colleagues over here. Are you going to be an echo for the Trump 
administration about this ludicrous idea of the SAVE Act? Are you going 
to be an echo for this ludicrous idea that our States that have vote by 
mail may all of a sudden now be subject to what the President, Homeland 
Security, and their enforcement of the post office is going to do to 
our ballots?
  Or are you going to be a headlight for the future of our country and 
the future of our democracy? I ask my colleagues to stand up for your 
vote, your constituents' votes, and for our rights, because if we don't 
stop this, I guarantee you, millions of Americans will be 
disenfranchised.
  Our future is much brighter with a system that allows millions of 
people in my State--80 percent, sometimes, of voters--to vote and do so 
with certainty and to follow their ballot. Let's not let this 2026 
election be stolen by people who want to get rid of the rules that we 
have lived by.
  Too many of those people that I mentioned died to get this right to 
vote, or the women who fought to get the right in 1920 and to preserve 
it, or the people who have fought in wars to make sure that we have 
this privilege and right. Let's hold on to it.
  I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.

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