Political Quotes

“I started working on election security with Senator Klobuchar in 2017. At the time, I served on the Senate Intelligence Committee. We have worked together, from the beginning, to make this a bipartisan--in fact, nonpartisan--issue. Elections are an American event. They have partisan results, but the act of voting is an American event, not a partisan event. We had a hearing in the Rules Committee. We worked through the process. We continue to get feedback. In fact, she and I worked incredibly hard to be able to reach out to and have multiple meetings with secretaries of State from all over the country to be able to hear as much feedback as we could from the States, because elections are run by States. Elections are not run by the Federal Government. Each State runs their own election. Each county or precinct or parish has its own structure for doing elections. In fact, one of the strengths of our system is the diversity of how elections are actually done. So we had to do a lot of work behind the scenes with all of these different States, to meet with their leadership, to meet with Governors, and to meet with as many groups as we possibly could to get it. The basic goal from the beginning was to achieve a piece of legislation that had a couple of features in it. First, ensure timely information sharing between the Federal Government, State, and local officials because we learned in 2016 it was not timely information that was shared.…”