Securing America's Federal Elections Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. LOUDERMILK. Madam Speaker, I thank my good friend from Illinois, an exceptional baseball player, as well, for yielding this time.

Look, this is something I am very passionate about, and I am a bit surprised that one of my colleagues from Georgia would speak against this bill or even support this bill.

Let's be frank. Yes, the Russians are bad. They are very bad. They seek to do harm to America, and they have been attempting to influence our elections for many years.

Yes, we need to be concerned about election security. But if you want to secure our election system, this is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

The State of Georgia has recognized this. Just this year, our State legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill to spend $150 million to upgrade our electronic voting machines so that they will produce a verifiable ballot that represents the way the person voted at the machine.

This is the direction we should be going, not to eliminate electronic ballots, not eliminate the efficiency that you get when you can walk in.

The verifiable aspect of it, a voter is given a card, after it is verified who the voter is. When a voter walks into a voting precinct, they fill out the paperwork and show their ID, and they are given a card that identifies that they have been certified. They insert that card and vote electronically, and then it will produce a printed receipt that they can verify that this is the way they voted. That receipt goes into a box that is used for a recount. That is a secure voting system that also embraces technology.

This bill would take us back decades. It is like when a student takes an SAT exam. They fill out the little bubbles, and then it runs through an electronic counter.

Look, even in our own hearing, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology agreed when I brought this scenario forward, that we use the technology of DREs that then will print a verifiable ballot or a receipt. He said that those were absolutely safe.

Now, here is the problem. When we go to paper ballots, and everyone is going to fill out these paper ballots, we are talking long lines. We are talking about fewer people being able to get to the polls.

Madam Speaker, when we decide to vote on this bill, the last thing you are going to say from that rostrum is Members will cast their votes via electronic device. Why? It is efficient. We have a verifiable way of making sure that we can see the way we voted on this board up here or on a printed piece of paper we can get in the back. This is because of efficiency.

Madam Speaker, can you imagine if we had to do paper ballots or voice vote every one of the many amendments we have on these appropriations bills? We would never go home. We would be here 24 hours a day.

The American people expect us to live by the same laws that they have to live by. We should embrace technology and make it secure, not revert back decades to old technology.

Look, the reality is, this bill would subject us to the problem of people walking up with boxes full of preprinted ballots, all across the Nation, and they could drop those in at the last minute. We need to verify that people voting are who they are.

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Mr. LOUDERMILK. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend from Illinois for yielding this minute to me.

The distinguished Speaker talked about misinformation, and I agree. There is a lot of misinformation out there about elections and election security and a lot of that that goes on around here. Let's be factual here.

There has been zero solid evidence of voter suppression during the last election, which had the largest turnout in the history of this Nation. Our own committee held seven field hearings across the Nation, with zero solid evidence of voter suppression, but the only acts of voter suppression that they tried to bring up had to deal with purging voter rolls.

We actually had one hearing in Broward County. What is Broward County known for? Voter irregularities. Why? Many times, why? Because of paper ballots.

But yet this is the direction we are going in, and the distinguished Speaker said we are taking it into the 21st century. Show me how. How is this taking us into the 21st century? It is taking us back decades.

Look, if the Russians were actually physically invading our Nation with bombers and tanks, this bill would be the equivalent of giving our military pellet guns and paper airplanes to thwart the attack. This is taking us away from election security.

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