work by a few hours. We will resume our responsibilities now, and we will finish our task tonight. The House and Senate Chambers will be restored good as new and ready for legislating in short order.
The counting of the electoral votes is our sacred duty. Democracy’s roots in this Nation are deep; they are strong; and they will not be undone, ever, by a group of thugs. Democracy will triumph, as it has for centuries.
So to my fellow Americans who were shocked and appalled by the images on their televisions today and who are worried about the future of this country, let me speak to you directly. The divisions in our country clearly run deep, but we are a resilient, forward-looking, and optimistic people. And we will begin the hard work of repairing this Nation tonight because here in America we do hard things. In America, we always overcome our challenges.
I yield the floor.
The Vice President. The majority leader.
Mr. McConnell. Mr. Vice President, I yield 2 minutes to the Senator from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford.
The Vice President. The Senator from Oklahoma.
Mr. Lankford. Mr. Vice President, you said things more eloquently than how we say it in Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, we say something like: Why in God’s name would someone think attacking law enforcement and occupying the United States Capitol is the best way to show that you are right? Why would you do that?
Rioters and thugs don’t run the Capitol. We are the United States of America. We disagree on a lot of things, and we have a lot of spirited debate in this room, but we talk it out, and we honor each other, even in our disagreements. That person, that person, and that person is not my enemy. That is my fellow American. And while we disagree on things, and disagree strongly at times, we do not encourage what happened today—ever.
Now, I want to join my fellow Senators in saying thank you to the Capitol Hill Police, the law enforcement, the National Guard, the Secret Service who stood in harm’s way. While we were here debating, they were pushing back. And I was literally interrupted midsentence speaking here because we were all unaware of what was happening right outside this room because of their faithfulness and because of what they have done. I want to thank them.
Ronald Reagan once said: Peace is not the absence of conflict. It is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.
The peaceful people in my State of Oklahoma want their questions answered, but they don’t want this, what happened today. They want to do the right thing, and they also want to do it the right way. They want to honor the constitutional process, but they also want to have debate about election security because they want to make sure it is right, which is why it is an important issue that still needs to be resolved.
Transparency in government just doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Obviously, the Commission that we have asked for is not going to happen at this point, and I understand that. And we are headed tonight toward the certification of Joe Biden to be the President of the United States, and we will work together in this body to be able to set a peaceful example in the days ahead.
I yield the floor.
The Vice President. The Democratic leader.
Mr. Schumer. The Senator from Nevada, Senator Cortez Masto.
The Vice President. The Senator from Nevada.
Ms. Cortez Masto. Mr. Vice President, I know that this room is full of leaders of both parties who love this country, and many believe that for America to succeed, our politics must find common ground. That has never been clearer than today, when armed rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, emboldened by President Trump’s false and inflammatory rhetoric about the 2020 elections.
I believe that we, in this Chamber, have a special duty as leaders to work together to lower the temperature of our politics, and I hope that my colleagues, who have questioned the legitimacy of this election in Arizona and all of these other States, now see the dire and dangerous consequences of sowing doubt and uncertainty.
I also know that, as U.S. Senators, we all take solemnly the oath we swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. At this moment in history, I can think of nothing more patriotic than renewing our faith in the Charters of Freedom that our Founding Fathers crafted for our Republic, starting with the fundamental American principle in our Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
The people have spoken in this election, and our only job here today is to do what they ask. It is not to argue election security. That is not the place for what we are doing today.
Our Constitution specifically reserves to the people the right to meet in their respective States and vote for the President and Vice President. As a result, individual States oversee and implement the election process, not the Federal Government.
To guard against fraud or irregularities in the voting process, the States are required to have robust election security measures. Likewise, State legislatures have the opportunity to examine evidence of voter fraud before they certify their electoral college votes. And our courts—from district courts to the United States Supreme Court—adjudicate legal challenges and election disputes. All of those things happened after the 2020 election.
Statehouses and courts across the country took allegations of voter fraud seriously and followed the constitutional process to hear challenges to this year’s election. No State found evidence of any widespread voter fraud and neither did any court ask to review the State’s findings.
In Arizona, Republican Governor Doug Ducey; the Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs; the Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich; and the State supreme court chief justice, Robert Brutinel all certified the results of the election on November 30.
And we know—we have heard—Arizonans have been voting by mail for almost 30 years, and Governor Ducey has expressed confidence in the State’s process numerous times. In November, he said:
We do elections well here in Arizona. The system is strong, and that is why I have bragged on it so much.
He further stated:
We have some of the strongest election laws in the country, laws that prioritize accountability and clearly lay out our procedures for conducting, canvassing and even contesting the results.
And they are right. Arizona has one of the most transparent election processes in the country with built-in accountability, starting with the internal auditing.
We have heard unfounded allegations that voting machines in Arizona and elsewhere somehow changed vote tallies or somehow improperly rejected ballots while claiming to accept them. These allegations all ignore the fact that Arizona counties conducted ballot audits by hand to double-check the machine counts, and these audits found no widespread fraud or irregularities.
Maricopa County, the county where more than 60 percent of the State’s population resides, conducted a post-election hand count audit in the week after the election, which showed perfect, 100 percent, accuracy in the machine tabulations. So why would we need, my colleagues, to call for a 10-day emergency audit to be conducted by a legislative commission when it has already been done by the State of Arizona? What happened to State’s rights?
The audit involved checking ballots for the Presidential election but also ballots for Federal and State legislative elections. The audit report shows every precinct’s machine and hand count totals for each of the races audited, and for every single race in every precinct, the difference between the hand count and the machine count was zero. Maricopa’s audit report stated: No discrepancies were found by the hand count audit boards.
Seeking to find any reason to contest these results, some of the State Republicans then tried to claim that Maricopa County failed to follow State law in conducting this audit by selecting voting center locations to audit instead of voting precincts. This was
