Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I want to call to the attention of the Senate the fact that a number of State legislatures, including our State legislature in Florida, have been enacting election law bills that severely constrict the right of the people to express their vote. This has just occurred in the State of Florida, with the legislature adjourning in the early morning hours of Saturday, enacting a bill that has been sent to the Governor that would make it harder for the people of Florida to vote, harder for them to have their vote counted, and harder for the people to be able to register to vote. Common sense would tell you what we ought to be doing is exactly the opposite--that we ought to be making things easier to vote, and especially in a State such as ours, which went through that awful experience in November of 2000, when there was so much chaos, not only in the voting in the Presidential election but then in the counting of the votes. Of course, we all know how that ended up--Bush v. Gore in the U.S. Supreme Court, which stopped the recount that was proceeding. Because of that experience, to the credit of the State legislature, they started to make voting easier. For example, instead of just voting on election day, they had a 2-week period for early voting--something that other States have been doing for some period of time, so that people could go to designated polling places prior to election day.…”