Dear Friends,
The right to vote is deeply personal to me. I’ve been working to make it easier for people to vote since I led the campaign in Oregon to lower the voting age as a college student.
It continues to be a hard fight. Now more than ever, access to the ballot is under threat across the country.
Just a few weeks ago, Republicans in Georgia filed a sweeping elections bill that limits early voting and vote by mail. These changes will undeniably disenfranchise voters, especially Black Georgians who helped deliver victories to Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
It’s not just in Georgia. There are currently 253 bills in 43 state legislatures with provisions that restrict voting access. These provisions actively continue a process of making it harder for Americans to vote through tactics like gerrymandering them into unrepresentative districts and undercutting their ability to select their elected officials, rather than elected officials selecting their voters.
This isn't just embarrassing, it's egregious and a dangerous threat to our democracy.
We should be making it easier to vote, not harder.
Yesterday, I was proud to cast my vote as the House passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, the most transformational and comprehensive democracy reform package in a generation.
This historic legislation improves voter access, election integrity, and security by:
- Making it easier to vote—regardless of income, ability, geography, or race;
- Ending the dominance of big money in politics; and
- Enacting tougher ethics standards to ensure that public officials actually work for the American people.
I’m particularly proud of the provisions that I incorporated into this bill to bring Oregon’s successful vote-by-mail model nationwide and establish automatic voter registration.
This legislation is decades overdue and critically important not just for the integrity of our democracy, but for its very survival!
