Protests
Senators Irwin and Brinks, under their constitutional right of protest (Art. 4, Sec. 18), protested against the passage of Senate Bill No. 303.
Senator Irwin moved that the statement he made during the discussion of the bill be printed as his reasons for voting “no.”
The motion prevailed.
Senator Irwin’s statement, in which Senator Brinks concurred, is as follows:
We aren’t here to create a voter ID law because we already have one. We are here because when more people participate in our elections, it’s bad for this gerrymandered majority. These bills seek to prevent some valid voters from casting their ballots in Michigan, because some voters do struggle to get a valid ID. We’ve got people who were born a long time ago; maybe citizens from other countries who struggle to get birth certificates; maybe they were born in the Jim Crow South and can’t get access to their birth certificates. We’ve got homeless people. We’ve got folks who don’t drive. We’ve got seniors who don’t immediately renew their driver’s license. And those people are going to be told when they get to the front of the line at their voting place that they can’t vote that day or that they can vote a provisional ballot that might be counted later if they can make it down to the clerk’s office. Some voters will just forget their ID. Some folks will show up at the polls who are valid voters—they are who they say they are—and they won’t have their identification. They might have to drive home a long distance, particularly voters who live in rural areas. And they are going to have questions. And when they question their poll workers, when they have that negotiation—when frustrated people who show up to exercise their right to vote get to the front of that line and try to cast their vote and are told that they cannot vote—they are going to have questions. They are going to be frustrated. And you know what else is going to happen? The people behind them in that line are going to have to wait longer. Some of those people who are going to have to wait longer have children at home. They have jobs they have to get back to. And some of those people, like we’ve seen too many times here in the state of Michigan, are going to leave that line and they are not going to be able to cast their vote. Their vote is going to be effectively suppressed by this legislation.
And it reminds me of a sad truth that exists here in the state of Michigan, which is that our voting rights are not equal. In some communities you walk into the precinct and you have to wait a long time to vote. In other communities you can walk right in. It’s breezy, it’s easy. That is wrong. That should be the issue that we’re seeking to fix here today. We should be working on trying to make voting easy and accessible and equal for everyone, not working on bills like this that create a bureaucratic nightmare for our poll workers, that create arguments and frustrations at the front of the line that make people wait longer. We don’t want long lines. We don’t want bureaucratic nightmares. Why are we subjecting our citizens to that in ways that suppress their vote? I’m a “no.”
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 304, entitled
A bill to amend 1954 PA 116, entitled “Michigan election law,” by amending sections 523a and 813 (MCL 168.523a and 168.813), as amended by 2018 PA 603.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: