[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10635-10636]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                           VOTING RIGHTS ACT

  (Ms. BROWN of Florida asked and was given permission to address the 
House for 1 minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. BROWN of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues for 
coming to the floor to discuss what I think is one of the most activist 
Court decisions probably in my lifetime.
  When I was elected to Congress in 1992, it was the first time an 
African American won an election in Florida in 129 years in this body. 
And I can't stand in this body and not think about what happened in the 
2000 election when we had a coup d'etat in this country, when 27,000 
voters from my districts, Districts 7, 8, 9 and 10, their ballots were 
not counted and were thrown out because of poor equipment.
  Let's don't talk about what happened 4 years later when Jeb Bush paid 
$4 million to a company that took all of the people off the ballot that 
were not even felons.
  In this recent election with this latest Governor, what did he do? 
They did away with Sunday voting because African Americans and others 
vote on Sunday.
  So our work is cut out for us. The legislature for the first time put 
together a program that clearly lays out what we need to do to move 
forward. So I urge my colleagues to move forward in making sure that we 
reinstate section 4 of the Voting Rights Act.

[[Page 10636]]



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