CBC Hour - Voter Suppression Laws

Floor Speech

Ms. MOORE. Thank you so much, Representative Fudge, for putting together this Special Order to talk about voter suppression laws.

I was first elected in 1988; and 2 years after that, in 1990, I began a career from that point on, up until this very day, fighting against these voter suppression laws. And the reason that I began my career that early is because our now-Governor of the State of Wisconsin led the effort to require voter ID, very strict forms of voter ID, in order to suppress the votes of certain members, certain populations in the Wisconsin community. So I am ashamed to announce today, Representative Fudge, that Wisconsin has joined the map of shame. It is one of seven States in red here on the map of shame that have very stringent voter ID laws in order to be able to vote.

Having debated this issue for many years, I know what the basic arguments for this are, and they're all discredited.

We have heard such arguments from our Governor, who was then a State representative, that if you need a voter ID to buy liquor or to buy medicine or to get a Blockbuster's video, surely you should need a voter ID for something as important as voting. I think that that is demonstrably a problem with that line of thinking. There is no more fundamental right than the right to vote. You don't have the right to drink liquor, Representative Fudge. You don't have the right to get a video from Blockbuster. And, shamefully, you don't have a right to health care. You don't have a right to get a prescription drug. But you do have a right to vote, so the bar ought to be extremely high to disenfranchise voters.

Now, we are discouraged on this floor and in this House from questioning the motivation of people who offer legislation. And in that same light, I question the motivation of those people who say that we must have this kind of legislation.

The Wisconsin attorney general's office found that in a 2-year election fraud task force investigation that there were 20 instances of possible voter fraud out of 3 million votes cast in 2008, the year that President Barack Obama ran, which is 0.0007 percent, and not a single one of these cases would have been prevented had the person had a voter ID. If it was a felon who had voted, your driver's license doesn't say ``felon'' on it. There was not a single case where a photo ID would have prevented these discrepancies. So I began to wonder about the motives of those who have said that we must have this law. Who are they trying to disenfranchise?

In the State of Wisconsin, 17 percent of white men and women don't have this kind of ID; 49 percent of African American women don't have this kind of ID; 55 percent of all African American males don't have this kind of ID; 46 percent of Hispanic men don't have this kind of ID; 59 percent of all Hispanic women don't have it; 66 percent of African American women ages 18 to 24 don't have this ID; and 78 percent of African American males ages 18 to 24 do not have this kind of ID.

In addition to this, there's a cost to getting the paperwork, the underlying paperwork to get a photo ID. You have to pay $20 for a replacement birth certificate, and in some States, you have to have a photo ID to get a birth certificate. And there are other costs.

In Wisconsin, a place where the largest number of these African American and Hispanic men and women who don't have this photo ID reside, there is no Department of Motor Vehicle station, Congresswoman Fudge, that is open, has evening hours or weekend hours, so the burden of getting this kind of ID is great.

I do realize that I need to yield back my time, but I just want to mention that this would also have a terrible impact on our young, college-age student voting population. This bill would require that they use a college ID that doesn't exist in the State of Wisconsin. There have been no moneys provided for the universities, none of which have this kind of ID to do it, and it would be a terrible burden on our elderly population who may want to vote absentee and would have to provide a Xerox copy of a photo ID. So for all those elderly Wisconsinites who have Xerox machines in their homes, you will be able to vote absentee from your home.

With that, I thank the gentlelady for yielding and thank you for this Special Order.

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