Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Mr. President, I rise today to address the topic of election reform.

The fact that it is the first bill to be considered by this body in the 2nd session underscores how important it is that we strengthen safeguards that protect the right to vote.

I would like to thank the Senators from Connecticut and Kentucky for their stead-fast commitment to protecting the ballot-box.

Together, we are going to deliver on our promise to “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

I believe that is what the American people want. Every American citizen who is properly registered to vote ought to be able to cast a ballot without difficulty.

At the same time, we ought to make it very – very – hard for people to cheat.

Because we know that every fraudulent vote cast dilutes the rights of those who cast lawful ballots.

I believe we have accomplished that goal in this legislation. After many months of negotiations. And hard work.

I am not a member of the rules committee. Nor, prior to last year, was I an expert on election reform. I first saw the corrosive effects of vote fraud in my 1972 election for governor of Missouri. My opponent engineered an effort to keep the polls open late in st. Louis.

Now, fast forward 28 years. Same state, same city, same play called from the same vote fraud play-book.

Again, I saw first-hand the an effort to illegally steal an election. I became involved again in this issue on November 7th, 2000. As reports circulated in St. Louis and throughout Missouri of — shall we say – some voting “irregularities” in St. Louis.

Now, what happened in St. Louis was truly extraordinary. It underscored that vote fraud is not merely something to be studied in the history books. Last year we found that vote fraud is alive and well in America.

Here is what happened.

The day before the November 2000 election, a candidate for U.S. Congress predicted that there would be so much confusion on election day, that a lawsuit would be necessary to keep the polls open .

“If it requires keeping the polls open a little longer, we’re going to get a court order to do it,” the future Congressman warned a crowd.

And sure enough, as predicted, on election day, there was much confusion -- some of it bused in -- and a lawsuit was filed to keep the polls open late in the city of St. Louis. The plaintiff in this case was a man named Robert D. Odom. His lawyer claimed Robert D. Odom could not vote because of the long lines and feared his client would be unable to vote unless the polls were kept open late.

But what we discovered was that Mr. Robert D. Odom’s real problem was not that he faced lines at the polling place that were too long.

No, that was not his problem. The main reason that Mr. Odom was unable to vote was because he had already been dead for a year and a half.

Long after the court case, when confronted with this uncomfortable fact, Mr. Odom’s attorney admitted to a mistake – though one he never bothered to share with the presiding judge or court to correct the record.

The plaintiff seeking relief was not Mr. Robert D. Odom. The attorney claimed it was Mr. Robert M. Odom – also known in local political circles as mark Odom, a local political operative for lacy clay, a successful democrat candidate for U.S. Congress during that election.

But the plaintiff’s new identity only raised more troubling questions. The deeper we dug the more we found.

And in the case of the Congressman’s aide, we found that despite his plea to the courts for relief from lines that were too long at the local polling places, the evidence shows that Mr. Odom had already voted earlier that day.

The evidence is his own signature on a signature card retrieved from his own polling place.

And so what we witnessed in St. Louis was a premeditated effort to keep the polls open late in St. Louis, an overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled city, because an aide to a Democrat candidate for U.S. Congress feared he would be unable to vote even though he had already voted that day.

It sounds incredible – but it is true. It is right there in the record. We have the court transcript and the all the records that document this scheme.

And you know what? The judge approved the request. And the polls were kept open late. Until that order was overturned later in the evening.

The effort to keep the polls open late in st. Louis was not the only voting “irregularity” on election day. Elsewhere in town, a panel of city judges was rubber-stamping court orders to allow unregistered people to vote.

A subsequent investigation by missouri’s secretary of state found that at least 1,233 st. Louis city and st. Louis county residents were illegally allowed to vote even though they were not registered to do so.

Here are some of the reasons given to judges for why people had failed to register before the deadline passed:

- “ I want a dem president”

- “I did not know it was required”

- “I was a felon. I was released on november 1999 and I didn’t know that I had to register again to vote”

....and here is my favorite:

- “i was late registering due to me were going through a mental disorder.”

And you know what the city judges did? They rubber stamped these requests – even though they failed to meet the clear standards under state law for court orders to vote.

Only 35 of the 1,268 court orders to vote met the legal standard set by missouri law.

All the evidence gathered by Missouri’s Secretary of State indicates that it was no accident that hundreds, if not thousands of unregistered people showed up in front of judges willing to rubber stamp these requests.

No accident, indeed.

The evidence indicates that there was a premeditated effort to organize the delivery of these illegal voters to the polls where they would be welcomed by judges all too willing to break the law by granting them illegal court orders.

What other irregularities did the secretary of state find?

- sixty-two (62) federal felons voted in that election along with fifty-two (52) state felons.

-sixty-eight (68) people voted twice.

- and fourteen (14) dead people cast votes. (I have heard of voters with an “undying commitment to politics” but this is too much.)

-seventy-nine (79) people registered to vacant lots in the city of st. Louis voted in the election.

- 45 of the city’s election judges were not registered to vote, as they are required to do in order to lawfully hold the position of election judge.

- the discovery of 250 addresses that are not identified as apartments from which eight or more individuals are registered to vote. A random sampling of 54 of these locations indicates that 14 of might have been used as drop-sites for multiple false voter registrations.

And all this is only what we know from the press and the public reports. There may be more. There is an ongoing federal investigation into what happened in that election – the results of which are not yet known.

Sadly, this vote fraud was not a one-time occurrence in November 2000. The specter of vote fraud returned to st. Louis the next spring, in time for the mayoral primary.

On the very last day to register to vote, someone dropped off 3,000 voter registration cards – most for alleged voters in the 3rd and 5th wards, north of St. Louis on two specific streets, most written with identical hand-writing and – and, as it turns out, most of them turned out to be fraudulent.

The brazenness of the vote fraud is stunning. One of the fraudulent voter registration cards belonged to city alderman Alberto “Red” Villa, who died 10 years before the primary.

A registration card belonging to the deceased mother of another city alderman was also found among the 3,000 dropped off on the last day of voter registration.

Now nobody gets stirred up by vote fraud during general elections between Democrats and Republicans – but watch out if it happens during a democratic primary for mayor.

After the shocking attempts to steal the mayoral primary race in St. Louis, the local press reported that the FBI subpoenaed all of the records at the city election board for both the general election and the mayoral primary.

While we await the results of that federal investigation, it has already provided quite an education. Some days I feel like an honors graduate from the St. Louis school of vote fraud.

The more we dug into this issue, the more we were able to see the size of the problem in St. Louis.

We found, for example, that the number of registered voters in the city threatens to outnumber the voting age population. A total of 247,135 St. Louis residents, dead, alive or canine, are listed as registered voters, compared to the city’s voting age population, according to the census bureau, of 258,532. That translate to a whopping 96-percent registration rate.

It is not just St. Louis. According to the associated press, there are 18 municipalities in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania with more registered voters than voting age adults. Upper St. Clair has 15,361 registered voters compared to only 14,369 residents of voting age.

Back to St. Louis. About one-quarter of registered voters in that city are on the inactive voter lists – meaning that the U.S. Postal service has failed to verify that 70,000 people are actually still living at the addresses from which they registered – or whether they are still alive.

It gets worse.

More than 23,000 people registered to vote in the city of St. Louis are also registered somewhere else in the state. That means 1 out of ten St. Louis city voters are double registered.

In a review of voter rolls in my state, we found five Missouri voters registered at four different places in the state.

Let me repeat that: we actually found five Missouri voters registered at four different places in the state.

And, of course, there is the impressive case of Ritzy Mekler, loyal St. Louis registered voter, and loyal mixed-breed canine. Yes, a dog registered to vote in St. Louis.

Now, I have respect for the dearly departed like City Alderman Red Villa and I like dogs, but I do not think they ought to vote.

About the only thing we have not seen in St. Louis, yet, is the actual election of a dead dog to political office.

Voting canines is not only a St. Louis problem. There was also the case of Cocoa Fernandez, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Cocoa’s owner registered the dog to shed light on “failings in our voter registration system.”

Some of these cases are humorous.

Others are deadly serious.

For example, a Saudi man detained by federal authorities in Denver, Colorado, for questioning about the September 11th terrorist attacks was found to have registered to vote at the local department of motor vehicles even though he was not a U.S. Citizen. Worse yet, records show that he actually voted in last year’s presidential election.

In Greensboro, N.C. a Pakistani citizen with links to two of the September 11th hijackers was indicted by a federal grand jury for having illegally registered to vote.

It really is quite sad that in the 21st century, in the world’s greatest democracy, we still tolerate woefully tangled and fouled up voter registration systems that all but invite vote fraud.

Mr. President, what I have recounted here in the last few minutes are the stories that formed my education into vote fraud.

And so while many wanted to talk only about Florida after the last election, I wanted to make sure that we learned the right lessons from the sad cases of vote fraud in St. Louis and elsewhere.

Because what we found here is not merely a local story. The root cause of what is so terribly wrong with St. Louis elections lies in federal law.

More specifically, it lies within the loopholes in federal law.

For example, federal law actually makes it very difficult for cities like St. Louis to maintain accurate voter registration lists.

And it blocks states from authenticating mail-in registration cards – the first line of defense in preventing vote fraud.

In order to prevent this kind of election scandal from occurring again in St. Louis or elsewhere, I knew that I had to fight to close the election law loopholes.

I had to share with my Senate colleagues what I had learned.

And so I testified before the Senate Committee on Government Affairs. And I sought to testify before the Rules Committee.

And my effort to tell the story of St. Louis brought me to Chris Dodd, the Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.

And I told him how important the topic of election reform was to me. I told him that election reform without protections against vote fraud could not earn my support.

And he listened. And we talked.

And we agreed on a formula that we felt could attract bi-partisan support. We agreed to write a bill together that makes it easier to vote and much, much harder to cheat.

And we have done that.

And I thank Chris Dodd and Mitch McConnell for listening to the concerns of Missourians who were outraged by what we saw in St. Louis in the November 2000 election.

We worked closely together for several months to close the loopholes, while taking every precaution to protect the rights of legal voters.

And this is what we have agreed upon:

* Registration cards will require prospective voters to declare under penalty of perjury whether or not they are U.S. citizens.

* Statewide registration systems to eliminate the patchwork, overlapping of county and city voter registration lists that have resulted in the kinds of multiple registrations seen in St. Louis. No longer will people be able to register in four or five different places in any state.

* Individuals who registered by mail will be required to vote in person the first time they vote – and they will be required to show identification.

Will this stop all vote fraud in St. Louis and other American cities? Of course, not.

But these changes in federal law will make it harder to commit vote fraud.

These are common-sense measures that will strengthen safeguards that protect the ballot box.

And to any of my colleagues who question the need for strengthened safeguards, I ask you to look at what happened in St. Louis.

Why is it acceptable to require photo id to board an airplane – or buy cigarettes – or alcohol, but it is not acceptable to require some kind of identification to carry out the most important of our civic responsibilities?

We have a responsibility to ensure that all legally cast votes are counted. And an equal responsibility to ensure that legally cast votes are not nullified by illegal votes.

We must strengthen confidence in our voting systems. People must know that their votes are accurately counted – and not discounted by illegally cast votes.

In the wake of the St. Louis vote fraud scandal, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District issued its ruling on the lawsuit to keep the polls open late in St. Louis.

I think the court’s opinion accurately characterized the task now before the Senate – before each of us.

...”(C)ommendable zeal to protect voting rights must be tempered by the corresponding duty to protect the integrity of the voting process...(E)qual vigilance is required to ensure that only those entitled to vote are allowed to cast a ballot. Otherwise, the rights of those lawfully entitled to vote are inevitably diluted.”

I yield the floor.