Click Here to Watch Senator Fischer’s Opening Statement.

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), a member of the Senate Rules Committee, today addressed the problems that S.1 will have on elections in her opening statement at the Rules Committee’s mark-up. 

Partial transcript  below:

We want to encourage people to vote. We want to make it easier for people to vote. We want to see good voter turnout.

These elections all across this country, from local levels to the President of the United States, are important.

It is important that we continue to advocate for people to get out and vote.

I also agree with Senator Capito with her comments that states should be given the flexibility to have that understanding that we have for our states and have laws that achieve those results. 

My biggest problem with this bill is giving the federal government control over elections.

I’ve said it before. Who in their right mind would support that. 

I cannot.

It was about 20 years ago when we had the Help America Vote Act.

In that act that was passed by Congress, it required that first-time voters show identification. 

My state of Nebraska followed that.

We have voter ID requirements for the first time you go to vote.

That makes sense.

A few years later, in 2005, we saw a bipartisan commission with Secretary of State Baker and President Jimmy Carter who came out. Part of their recommendations were that they endorsed a photo identification requirement. 

And we have many states who now have that as part of their voter laws.

When I was in the Nebraska Legislature, the first bill that I got passed dealt with voting.

It was in 2005, and it was to allow mail-in voting for the first time in Nebraska so certain precincts would be able to do that. And it was because of a sparsity factor. 

I happen to live in a very remote area of the state of Nebraska with less than one person per square mile, and that was one of the seven areas where we wanted to make sure that people would have access to voting. But there was another reason for it, which dealt with the cost that we saw under the Help America Vote Act. 

The requirement there for precincts, any precinct, to have certain voting machines to have the storage for those machines would add extra costs, and that just wasn’t feasible for a 6,000 square mile county like mine to be able to maintain all those precincts at a cost that would be involved there. 

That was the beginning then of early voting in taking place in Nebraska.

Now we have that. It’s no-excuse voting.

You don’t need to have a reason that you are going to be absent, for example, on election day.

It’s just available. And that was a decision made in Nebraska through the experiences that we have in our state. 

It’s in response to requests by constituents.

It’s not the federal government coming in and telling us that we should, like Oregon, all have mail-in voting.

It’s not the federal government coming in and saying that we should have, like Mississippi, some of their requirements that they have.

These are state decisions, and they are based on experiences that we have in our states.

In Nebraska, voting rights are restored to convicted felons after two years.

That was a decision made after a long process in our state’s legislature on what we felt worked best in our state through our experiences.

We use that flexibility to make those decisions.

In Nebraska, you can have your county be able to pull records from a different county when a voter moves. 

You are able to reregister that person in a new county, so you have a record of where that person is now and where their voting precinct is.

All of these things take into consideration what each and every state has, what works best, what meets their uniqueness that they have.

To take that away and to add more burdens makes no sense to me.

To put in, as we can see in this bill, a number of deadlines that again we all know cannot be reached.

To have that in this bill makes no sense to me.

To change a bipartisan federal election commission into a purely political machine makes no sense to me.

Let’s not throw all this commotion out there, saying one side or the other is trying to limit who can vote because we don’t like a certain segment of the population.

That is ridiculous, and the American people know that is not true.

Everyone in this room wants to make sure that every American have the right to vote.

Thank you.