VOTING RIGHTS

On 2026-06-23, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) delivered a floor speech titled "VOTING RIGHTS" in the Senate.

VOTING RIGHTS

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 105 (Tuesday, June 23, 2026) [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 allo