WASHINGTON - Today, Committee on House Administration Chairman Bryan Steil (WI-01) unveiled the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act. This comprehensive package of election reforms puts baseline requirements in place for state election administration. 

"Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification," said Chairman Steil. "These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat."

The legislation, which will be introduced during the House’s Friday pro-forma session, will: 

  • Require photo identification to vote 

  • Require states to verify citizenship of individuals when registering to vote 

  • Implement stronger routine voter list maintenance requirements in states 

  • Require mail-in ballots to be received by the close of polls on election day 

  • Require states to use auditable paper ballots 

  • Ban ballot harvesting  

  • Ban ranked choice voting 

  • Ban universal vote by mail 

Here’s what others are saying about the MEGA Act: 

"I’ve spent the last decade registering voters across the country and empowering Americans to vote. Without fair elections, we aren’t a free nation," said Scott Presler, Founder of Early Vote Action. "Thank you to Chairman Steil for his leadership on comprehensive election reform. Let’s make elections great again!"

"MEGA is a fantastic comprehensive bill that restores integrity to our elections," said Cleta Mitchell, Election Integrity Network Founder.

"Noncitizen voting in American elections is unacceptable. As an American citizen, casting a ballot is a civic duty, a unique privilege, and a fundamental right to help determine who represents you in government and who will stand for your ideas, values, and freedom. And that right, which men and women have died on foreign battlefields to protect, is discarded when noncitizens are allowed to vote," said the Honorable Kenneth Blackwell, America First Policy Institute's Chair of Election Integrity. "Requiring photo voter ID, prohibiting ranked-choice voting in federal elections, preserving election records, and more as included in the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, are strong reforms that restore voter confidence and implement clear baseline standards for election administration."

"Americans deserve elections that they can trust, which is why advancing election integrity policies is so important for our politics. House Republicans have proven that they are not shying away from the fight to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat. Honest Elections Project Action commends Chairman Steil, the House Administration Committee, and Speaker Johnson for their commitment to enhancing election integrity," said Jason Snead, Honest Elections Project Action Director.

"This omnibus sets the minimum national standards voters expect: photo ID, citizenship verification, accurate voter rolls, and ballots counted only if received by the close of polls on Election Day. Most Americans thought these were already the basic responsibilities of election officials — and many have been shocked to learn that in too many places, they are not," said Ken Cuccinelli, National Chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative. "This package makes voting accessible for eligible citizens while closing loopholes that invite abuse, by banning ballot harvesting, stopping taxpayer-funded partisan registration schemes, and requiring auditable paper ballots. This is how we restore trust and integrity in federal elections and make it easy to vote and hard to cheat."

“The bill gives clear guidance where the original law in 1993 failed – states have an obligation to have clean voter rolls. 25,000 dead registrants in Michigan or voters supposedly living in Vegas casinos will no longer be acceptable. This bill will bring clarity to voter roll maintenance obligations under the NVRA,” said J. Christian Adams, President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and Commissioner on the Unites States Commission of Civil Rights. 

"I applaud Chairman Steil for leading efforts to reform and modernize our elections system. For too long, federal laws — especially those governing voter list maintenance — have hampered states that are serious about improving election security and enabled those that are not. Reform is long overdue," said Justin Riemer, President & CEO, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE).*

*title for ID purposes only

Read the full bill text here.

Background:

The Committee on House Administration has oversight authority of federal elections.  

Chairman Steil previously introduced the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act during the 118th Congress. 

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