Continuity in Representation Act of 2005

CONTINUITY IN REPRESENTATION ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - March 03, 2005)

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Ms. WATERS. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Conyers) for allowing me a moment to speak on this issue.

This is very, very important. I would like to bring to your attention the fact that former Minority Leader Gephardt appointed me to chair a special committee on election reform of the Democratic Caucus. And I have traveled to at least four States talking to people about what had gone wrong in the elections in the 2000 elections.

One of the things that we concentrated on was provisional ballots. And we wrote into the Help America Vote Act that if you went to a polling place and they said your name was not there, that you are to be given a provisional ballot no matter where you went. Little did I know that something had happened in the Help America Vote Act, perhaps, that allowed Ken Blackwell in Ohio to have a different law from everybody else on provisional ballots. And so thousands of people went to polling places and were told they could not vote because they were in the wrong precinct. That is not what we wrote into the law. So we had thousands of ballots that were not counted in Ohio because Mr. Ken Blackwell described his law a lot differently than we had framed the law in the Help America Vote Act.

That is the one place perhaps in America with a law on provisional balloting that does not allow someone who swears that they are registered to vote to be able to vote.
I thank the gentleman for the opportunity to share this information at this important time.

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