Military Voting Protection Act
Floor Speech
MILITARY VOTING PROTECTION ACT -- (Senate - September 18, 2008)
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, as the Senate knows, yesterday we voted to pass the Defense authorization bill. However, one of the casualties of yesterday's process--which was unique, to my knowledge; we actually had only two rollcall votes on amendments to the Defense authorization bill, which I don't think has ever happened before, and many important amendments were blocked by the process, amendments that might have been included in the managers' package. I wish to mention just one of those, which is the Military Voting Protection Act.
This was originally offered as a freestanding bill earlier, but then it changed to become an amendment to the Defense authorization bill because we thought it was particularly appropriate, as we were dealing with the needs of the men and women in uniform around the world, that we also respect and enforce their right to cast a vote.
We know from 2006 statistics alone that of all of the eligible civilian and military voters around the world who were eligible and who actually requested an absentee by mail ballot, only 5.5 percent of those votes were actually counted. That is a disgraceful statistic and one we need to do something about.
I compliment Senator Levin, Senator Feinstein, and others for working with us during the process of the Defense authorization bill to come together on what I believe was a clear and acceptable amendment to all sides, but because of the bizarre process we found ourselves in yesterday, this bill was basically a casualty of that process, as I say.
So what I am hoping to do is take a bill we worked on that is very important in order to protect one of the most important civil rights of our men and women in uniform--the right to vote--and hopefully, by unanimous consent today, we can pass this bill and get it on its way to the President for signature in due course. I don't see any reason, since we did work together on this on a bipartisan basis and it has been cleared by both sides, there would be any objection.
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