Sylvester Turner: “when the processes that are meant to guarantee our freedoms are abused, they are weakened in meaning and the rights and…”

“when the processes that are meant to guarantee our freedoms are abused, they are weakened in meaning and the rights and privileges that they are meant to protect are placed in peril. Like the person who cried wolf for attention, who risked the safety of the herd by demeaning and diminishing the meaning of the alarm, the objecting Members today weaken the processes of objecting to a State's electoral votes and place in peril future real attacks on our voting rights. If their goal today was to protect the right to vote, why object only to Ohio? Why not pick a State that voted for John Kerry? Because the objection today is not about protecting our right to vote. It is about undermining our election process and our President. Mr. Speaker, we are asking people in Afghanistan and Iraq to risk their lives to vote, and today we hear complaints about the time it took to vote in free elections in the greatest democracy in the world. My hometown newspaper in Dayton, Ohio said, ``What's not in order is the suggestion of some great fraud where there is none. Some people will take advantage of the inevitable flaws of elections to confuse other people . . . Those people do harm, not good.''”