House Republicans Introduce Sweeping Election Integrity Bill

Looking to beef up election integrity ahead of November’s midterms, Republicans are introducing the Make Elections Great Again, or MEGA, Act. 

The bill, led by House Administration Committee Chairman Brian Steil, R-Wisconsin, includes many of the measures that election integrity-hating Democrats have fought so feverishly to kill. It requires photo ID to cast a ballot, proof of U.S. citizenship to vote, and bans practices that have plagued election security and voter confidence for years. 

“Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” Steil said in a statement to The Federalist.

‘At Some Point’

The multi-front House bill comes as Senate Republicans, at least momentarily, seem to be waking up from their long winter’s nap and get moving on the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act ). The bill, long ago passed by the Republican-controlled House, would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in U.S. elections. 

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the bill was being modified to include a photo ID provision. 

“If you’re going to have what we call photo ID, or voter ID, when someone goes into the ballot box to vote, that’s not currently covered in the bill,” Thune told reporters. “So that’s going to be fixed and addressed, and I think the new bill that comes out hopefully will deal with that.” 

When will the new-and-approved SAVE Act come up for a vote? “At some point,” Thune said, noting that it has yet to be considered by the relevant committee. 

It’s certainly not a controversial proposal. A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that nearly three-quarters of likely voters (74%) believe that requiring photo ID to vote is a reasonable ask to protect the integrity of elections. That’s basically unchanged from a poll conducted in July. Just 16 percent of respondents disagree, with 10 percent not sure. 

‘This is the Ballgame’

The MEGA Act would also amend the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act by requiring stronger routine clean up of state voter rolls. 

That’s a critical provision. Several states are notorious for their dirty voter rolls, including Michigan where the Public Interest Legal Foundation found some 25,000 dead people on the active vote database. 

PILF sued Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who has been at open war with election integrity groups. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Benson, agreeing that states don’t have to clean up their voter rolls, they just need to try. Just what that means is open to interpretation. In Michigan, that means the dead voters stay. 

The foundation has petitioned before the U.S. Supreme Court, but if SCOTUS doesn’t take the case the Sixth Circuit decision stands. 

“This is the ballgame, whether we’re going to have clean voter rolls or not,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said on a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour. 

‘Easy to Vote, Hard to Cheat’

The MEGA Act also codifies President Donald Trump’s executive order banning “Bidenbucks,” ensuring that federal agencies are not using taxpayer money to conduct partisan voter registration campaigns. Biden administration officials worked closely with leftist groups leading up to the 2024 election to assist in federalized get-out-the-vote campaigns targeting Democrat voters. 

States would also have to use auditable paper ballots for a federal election. And the bill would ban ballot harvesting, ranked-choice voting, and universal vote-by-mail, all used liberally in Democrat states, all generating myriad election integrity complaints.

The authors of the MEGA bill included a measure that would require mail-in ballots to be received on Election Day to be counted. Federal law, as interpreted by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, requires ballots to be cast and received by Election Day, but several states have taken that language to mean days after. 

Adams called late-arriving ballots that cause late announcements of winners “is the single-most destabilizing component of American elections.”

“I think it creates doubt and it invites mischief,” PILF’s general counsel said. 

In notoriously slow-counting California, results for a key congressional seat were delayed more than a month. Democracy delayed is democracy denied. 

The issue is before the Supreme Court. Adams said the case will turn on the what the meaning of “cast” is. Last March, Trump issued an executive order calling for all ballots to be received by the time the polls close on Election Day. He said the extended ballot count “is like allowing persons who arrive 3 days after Election Day, perhaps after a winner has been declared, to vote in person at a former voting precinct, which would be absurd.”

Expect little support for the MEGA Act from Democrats, who have repeatedly voted nearly en bloc against election integrity bills. 

“These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat,” Steil said. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.