Defense Authorization

Floor Speech

DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION -- (Senate - September 17, 2008)

Mr. CORNYN. I thank the Chair.

I want to move to another topic and say I am pleased that an amendment which I have offered that will protect military voting rights has been apparently accepted as a part of the managers' package on the Defense authorization bill.

This is a provision which I offered last week and we had been unsuccessful getting a vote on that. But I am pleased that through negotiations in a bipartisan effort between the bill managers, Senator Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator Warner, the former chairman, who is the minority bill manager, that has been accepted as part of the managers' package.

The fact is, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, only 992,000 of the 6 million eligible military and overseas voters were able to request an absentee ballot for the 2006 election, and only 330,000 of those ballots were filled out and actually reached election officials.

That means, in other words, that only 5.5 percent of eligible military and overseas voters were able to fill out a ballot and mail it in and have it counted. To me that is a scandalous statistic, one I am glad that this body, in a bipartisan fashion, is going to respond to and say ``no more.''

We are going to deal with this issue in a way that makes sure that the ballot of those who are fighting, deployed in very dangerous places, is going to count as much as our ballots here in the continental United States.

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