Securing America's Federal Elections Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. RASKIN. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of the SAFE Act because Vladimir Putin conducted a sweeping and systematic campaign to disrupt and destabilize our Presidential election in 2016.

Some say we can't pass the SAFE Act to guarantee the security of our elections, that because of federalism, we should let the States work it out on their own.

But we are not the fragmented, divided States of America. We are the United States of America, and that is the way we were designed.

Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution, Madam Speaker, says Congress ``shall guarantee to every State in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion.''

What does it mean by ``republican form of government''? It doesn't mean a Republican Party form of government. It means a representative form of government. That means we must have a system that accurately translates the popular will into the election of a Congress.

This is a massive technical challenge in a country of hundreds of millions of people, 50 States, and thousands of jurisdictions, especially in the computer age. We need voter-certified, paper-ballot voting systems in every State in the Union. We need risk-reducing audits. We need real accountability for election vendors. We need voting machines manufactured in the United States, where our democracy is created, too.

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