Elections

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I also come to the floor today to talk about the need for integrity in our elections.

In 2020, the American people voted for a 50-50 Senate. We are in that body today. And they gave Republicans nearly a dozen more seats in the House of Representatives.

In the Presidential election, 37 electoral votes were decided by less than 1 percent in those States. Without those 37 electoral votes, President Biden would have failed to achieve a majority in the electoral college. This was a close election. The reason it is a close election is it is a closely divided country.

I am home every weekend in Wyoming and the two things I hear about is, one, this massive bill in front of the Senate right now--a $1.9 trillion amount of money that is all going to be added to the debt--and the concern for that spending. And the other issue is the integrity of our elections.

So we have a close election. We have a closely divided country. If you would think anything, that should be a mandate to move to the middle, to find common ground, and to work for solutions. It is the kind of things that the President talked about in his inaugural address on January 20.

At a time like this, Americans want to make sure that our own elections are safe and secure and fair. I think voters, no matter what their political party or predisposition is--I think all voters deserve that, and they want it.

But when Republicans raise questions about the integrity of the election, well, we are attacked, and we have seen that now. In fact, earlier this very week, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate spoke of ``the pernicious and nasty guise of election integrity.'' ``Pernicious and nasty guise of election integrity''--the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. He attacked the motives of millions of Americans who want to be confident in our elections. Every American ought to want to be confident in our elections.

But it looks like though some Democrats may accuse us of this, many Democrats share our concerns. I hear that from both sides of the aisle.

Democrats in Iowa, right now, are contesting a congressional race, and as I stand here, Democrats in the House are considering the most sweeping changes--and this is reason I am here--to election laws in decades.

Their bill is nearly 800 pages long. It is called H.R. 1, No. 1. To me, that means it is their No. 1 priority. Otherwise, why would they introduce it as their first bill and label it as H.R. 1? H.R. 1, for Democrats in the House, is not the coronavirus. It is not jobs. It is not schools. It is a change in the election process for the American people and is a big mandate coming out of Washington. So the No. 1 priority of House Democrats is not those key issues. Their No. 1 issue is elections and changing elections in our country.

The bill, interestingly, didn't go through a normal committee process as bills are supposed to do in the House or in the Senate. It went straight to the floor--from Nancy Pelosi's desk to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Hundreds of pages are in there of new mandates, and it tells each of our States how to hold elections. It doesn't read, ``States, you do it.'' It tells the States how to do it. These aren't just any mandates. These are radical leftwing mandates that people in my home State of Wyoming view as scary and say would make the elections less secure. This bill is so radical that an earlier version of it was felt to be too liberal even for the ACLU, and the latest version is even more liberal than that. I am just going to mention a few of the mandates in this bill.

H.R. 1 would force every State--force every State--to give the vote to convicted felons. This would not be a State choice but a Federal mandate. One group of Democrats even tried to give the vote to felons who are still in prison right now, but that amendment failed.

H.R. 1 would force every State to allow same-day voter registration, online voter registration, and even automatic voter registration. Automatic voter registration? Voter registration is something somebody should have to do, register to vote. If the bill were to become law, you would be registered to vote automatically, without even knowing it, and when the States automatically register you, you are not allowed to find out how they got your information. They can't tell you. In effect, voter registration would be a thing of the past. A thing that we all did as young people, register to vote, would be a thing of the past.

H.R. 1 forces States to count provisional ballots statewide. So, if you vote Democrat in one district and are from another district, they will count it as a vote for the Democrat in your district. Mistakes like this shouldn't happen, let alone should your vote be able to be changed from the vote you actually cast.

The bill also doubles down on mail-in voting. The problems with that, I think people would agree, are obvious. Amazon--and many of us shop on Amazon, if not everyone--recently tried to restrict mail-in voting for a union election at one of its facilities. That is not because Amazon has conservative leadership; it is because they say it is harder to secure mail-in voting than it is to secure in-person voting. If you want an accurate vote, in-person voting is more accurate. The reason mail-in voting was expanded last year was because of the pandemic, but now the Democrats want to carve it into stone forever.

H.R. 1 would also take government funding and give it to political campaigns. The American people have some thoughts on that. The bill actually has a 6-to-1 match for campaign donations under $200. So, if you were to donate $100 to your favorite candidate, the Federal Government would take taxpayer dollars and give an additional $600 of taxpayer money to that candidate who just got a $100 check. Hard- working people would pay their taxes knowing that their hard-earned dollars would go to fund political activity, even activity that they would not necessarily agree with.

Like so many liberal government programs, this is a system that could easily be defrauded. We see that now with the coronavirus bill as well. The Democrats know that they would still get their big corporate donations in New York and in San Francisco, but now they would get an added bonus--a 6-to-1 match--from taxpayers.

H.R. 1 would also give government-funded vouchers for people to donate to political campaigns. Political campaigns do not need taxpayer subsidies. People can decide how they want to spend their own money. The government shouldn't be redirecting it toward the party in power. The Democrats complain about money in politics all of the time. The solution, in seeing H.R. 1, apparently, is for there to be more money in politics as long as it is the taxpayers' money.

H.R. 1 ends the equal balance between the Republicans and Democrats on the Federal Election Commission. It ends it. The Democrats want to politicize the Commission that enforces our election laws. They want to make it a partisan organization. That is just another idea that would make it easier to commit fraud.

H.R. 1 doesn't just politicize the Federal Election Commission; it politicizes the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS. The Democrats want to break down the guardrails that currently keep the IRS out of politics. H.R. 1 gets rid of any of the limits on the IRS when giving tax exemptions to nonprofits. Now, think about this. Remember the scandal at the IRS under the Obama-Biden administration--a scandal, headlines. People are well aware. Well, H.R. 1 enshrines that into law. H.R. 1 gives a big stamp of approval to Lois Lerner and her behavior in the way she worked the IRS. Every Democrat who votes for the bill is saying that he or she will endorse what happened at the IRS under President Obama.

There is more, a lot more. The bill goes on and on. It is 800 pages. It is hard to believe too many Democrats have actually read it.

The bottom line is this: H.R. 1 would not reform our elections; it would deform our elections, change them dramatically. H.R. 1 makes our elections harder to secure, easier to defraud, and will cast doubt on every election into the future. That is the last thing we need in this country.

This is no time to sow doubt about our elections. People want confidence in the elections. That is why I am joined with Senator Scott of Florida, Senator Hyde-Smith, and Senator Lummis to introduce a better proposal. Our bill would make our elections safe and secure and fair. It would give people more confidence in our elections.

Our bill says: no automatic registration. The House bill repeals all voter ID laws. Our bill says, if you want to register to vote, let's make sure you are a citizen. We need to make sure of your identification. Let's make sure you have a Social Security number. Those are the sorts of things to provide integrity in the election process.

Under our bill, States can't just send out ballots in the mail based on old information, and that happened all around the country this year. You can still vote by mail. You just need to request a ballot so your information is up to date. It is the way we have done it in Wyoming. We send out requests to say, if you would like a ballot, apply for your absentee ballot, and people do. There is no question about the integrity of that system. It was in a number of States in which ballots were mailed out based on old information and without a request by a voter for that ballot that led to so many concerns about the abuse and fraud.

Our bill bans vote harvesting. It means you can't drop off somebody else's ballot.

The collection boxes they have need to be monitored. When you turn in your ballot to a ballot box, that ought to be monitored.

When votes are being counted, our bill makes sure that both sides are watching.

Our bill prohibits delays or pauses in ballot counting.

We require an audit of ballot counting systems within 30 days after the election.

Now, these are basic, commonsense measures to protect against fraud and error. You want it to be accurate. You want it to be fair.

The differences between our bill and the House's 800-page bill could not be more clear. The Republican bill makes it harder to commit fraud. The Democratic bill makes it easier to commit fraud. The Republican bill costs almost nothing. The Democratic bill costs billions. The Republican bill strengthens the protections of our elections. The Democratic bill weakens those protections and even gets rid of some of them.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We should all be against voter fraud. We should make it as hard to commit fraud as we possibly can. So I urge my colleagues to join me with Senators Scott and Lummis and Hyde-Smith. Let us stand for integrity in our elections.

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