Chuck Schumer

If we had one change to make this better, what would it be?

We need numbers to judge what kind of success we are having.

We could always say, well, they should have registered. That is probably what Mr. Nelson would say, right?

How many total people are there in South Dakota?

This illustrates the point I think that both Mr. Ansolabehere and Mr. Gans were making.

I have run this one by Doris Meissner, who sort of likes it for the immigration purposes.

It does not sound radical to me, but maybe the Inspector General was exaggerating or using too strong language.

It showed me the power of elections and--it was very interesting.

All those numbers are consistent. They represent different categories.

We do not have--every state, am I correct, does not allow people to decide to vote absentee within a week or two.

The astounding fact here was the reports... that large numbers of people just could not vote.

But you would agree there is not a grand conspiracy on either side.

Based on the results of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which Senator Schumer discussed, I project that 9 million Americans did not vote because they had recently moved or because the date for registering to vote had already…

The question of last minute registration, the massive amount of data entries involved, are a lot to place on local county officials with limited resources.

But just to quibble with my good friend, in the first half of the 19th century, nobody voted in Utah.

I cannot imagine what it was like for millions of voters, some of whom attempting to vote for the first time last year, were told they were not registered correctly and could not cast a ballot.

This is undemocratic, unacceptable.

But the instance of, say, the military soldier who was assigned, wants to vote, and did not.

We have had some serious circulation problems.

There may be a need to change some of those rules.

I think that we all do agree that, generally, a system that was created in the 19th century was created in a way that should be fair.

I want to thank the six witnesses. I thought the testimony was excellent.

Both are problems, and I think we have to address both.

I expect we are going to be pretty active in that area this year in terms of elections, in terms of voting and things like that.

I met you in the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968, when I was a freshman.