Collins opposes H.R. 1

“We shouldn’t be making it a crime for election officials to do their job, which is to prevent people who have no legal right to vote from voting illegally.”

WASHINGTON — Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, made the following statement in opposition to H.R. 1, which is scheduled for a vote in the House this week. Below are the remarks as prepared. Rep. Doug Collins: Mr. Speaker, I’m going to describe the terrible policy behind the provisions of H.R. 1 in the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee. First, the bill creates a private cause of action for lawsuits related to the Help America Vote Act of 2002. That means the bill allows anyone to sue anybody if they don’t like the way an election was conducted in a locality, a state or nationwide. Do you all remember the lawsuit Bush v. Gore? In 2000, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore didn’t like the results of the vote in Florida. If he could get the Florida results overturned, he’d get enough electoral votes to win the presidency. So, he sued to get the Florida results overturned by a court. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which finally stopped the recount after a month of legal wrangling that made America look like its elections were determined by lawyers, not voters. Well, under the bill before us today, you won’t just see more cases with names like “Gore v. Florida.” You’ll see these sorts of lawsuits: “Everybody v. Everybody.” Does a candidate need a thousand more votes to win? Then the candidate can sue in two or three counties and see if a judge will order those votes into their vote column. Does a candidate need a few thousand more votes? Then under this bill they could sue a dozen counties. Need a million votes? This bill allows a losing candidate and disgruntled activists to sue in all fifty states — “Gore v. Georgia,” “Gore v. Oklahoma,” “Gore v. any-state-it-takes-to-gather-enough-judicial-rulings-to-cobble-together-an-election-victory” — taking time and money away from state and local election officials, who desperately need that money to administer free and fair elections, not pay bogus legal fees. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 was enacted precisely to avoid future lawsuits like Gore v. Florida. Now this bill would undo all that and make matters much worse. Second, this bill takes power away from voters and gives it to convicted criminals by denying state voters their constitutional right to limit voting by people who have been convicted of murder, violent felonies or other serious crimes — including voter fraud. These provisions are patently unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, including liberal Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, all held just a few years ago that — and I quote — “Surely nothing in [the Elections Clauses of the Constitution] lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.” Further, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution itself explicitly recognizes the right of states to deny the vote for — and I quote — “participation in . . . crime.” Third, this is what happens when you bypass a committee markup. A provision of the bill, at page 99, lines 7-12 of the Committee Print, states — quote — “No person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intentionally hinder, interfere with or prevent another person from voting, registering to vote or aiding another person to vote in an election . . . ” That text makes it illegal to prevent a four-year old from voting, to prevent an illegal alien from voting and to prevent any other non-qualified voter from voting. That same provisions appears again on pages 102 to 103 and adds a criminal penalty of up to five years in prison and a $100,000 fine. The problem is the provision I just quoted doesn’t refer to a person’s exercising the “right” to vote — that is, voting when they have a legal right to vote. The standard term used when a statutory provision is aimed at protecting legitimate voters from voting refers to the “denial or abridgment” of the “right to vote.” But this provision doesn’t contain those key terms, meaning the provisions would literally make it illegal to prevent illegal voters from voting. We shouldn’t be making it a crime for election officials to do their job, which is to prevent people who have no legal right to vote from voting illegally. Every illegal voter cancels the vote of a legal voter. This was recognized by the Supreme Court in the case of Reynolds v. Sims, in which the Court held that — and I quote — “the right [to vote] can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise.” So if the bill before us today becomes law, precincts are going to have to start passing out stickers for illegal voters that say this: “My Illegal Vote Negated the Vote of a Legal Voter!” This is what happens when a bill that falls under the jurisdiction of 10 separate committees comes to the floor without proper hearings and markups. I urge all my colleagues to oppose this attempt to federalize and politicize our sacred election process.