Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., speaks as Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump listens during a campaign rally at Dodge County Airport, Sunday, Oct. 6, 2024, in Juneau, Wis. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Republicans in Congress have unveiled a new bill that would impose the most extreme voting restrictions ever proposed at the federal level.
The new bill goes far beyond even the SAVE Act, which the House passed last year and which one historian called “the most extraordinary attack on voting rights in American history.”
It’s being unveiled at a time when GOP anti-voting legislation has been steadily gaining GOP support in the Senate, after a push by President Donald Trump and anti-voting groups.
Introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), the chair of the House Administration Committee, the proposal is called the Make Elections Great Again Act, or MEGA Act — a name deliberately echoing President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan.
While the SAVE Act focuses almost exclusively on requiring voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship when registering, the MEGA Act is far more sweeping. It would:
- Impose a strict photo ID requirement to vote,
- create a centralized voter surveillance system in every state,
- mandate constant voter roll purges, gutting the “Motor Voter” law that expanded access to voter registration
- bar states from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day,
- ban universal mail voting, in which states mail a ballot to all registered voters
- bar the federal funding for voter registration by outside groups,
- and unleash lawsuits against election officials — all at once.
The provision requiring photo ID states that election officials “may not provide a ballot for an election for Federal office to an individual who desires to vote in person unless the individual presents to the official a valid physical photo identification,” according to the bill text.
The bill also aggressively targets voter registration itself. It would require states to demand documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before registering anyone to vote in federal elections and to repeatedly re-check the eligibility of people who are already registered.
States would be ordered to take “affirmative steps as are necessary on an ongoing basis, but in no case less frequently than once every 30 days, to verify the eligibility of registrants,” the bill adds.
Those checks would rely heavily on government databases that are known to contain errors, including records related to felony convictions, deaths, address changes and immigration status. If a voter is flagged, the consequences could be immediate and public.
The bill requires states to place people deemed ineligible on “a publicly available list” while they attempt to prove they should not be removed.
But perhaps the most far-reaching provision of the MEGA Act is its mandate that every state create a centralized voter database that would control federal elections. The bill requires “a single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list” that would serve as “the official voter registration list for the conduct of all elections for Federal office in the State.”
That system would be continuously updated, coordinated with other government databases and used to assign a unique identifier to every voter — effectively making a single state-controlled database the gatekeeper of voting rights in federal elections.
The bill also dramatically expands who can sue over voting.
It explicitly authorizes the U.S. attorney general to sue states to force compliance with the new rules. At the same time, it gives private individuals the power to sue election officials who register a voter without the required proof of citizenship.
Mail voting would be sharply curtailed as well. The MEGA Act abolishes universal vote by mail for federal elections, requiring voters to affirmatively request an absentee ballot before one can be sent.
States that currently mail ballots to all eligible voters — systems that have operated securely for years — would be forced to dismantle them for federal races.
Taken together, the MEGA Act represents one of the most catastrophic proposals for democracy in the United States. Where voting would move from a fundamental right to a permission-based system — one where voters must repeatedly prove their eligibility, navigate bureaucratic obstacles and hope they are not wrongly flagged by a single database.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Wednesday he plans to bring a more restrictive version of the Act to the Senate floor once it is amended and advances out of committee.
“At some point, we’ll have that vote,” Thune said at a GOP leadership press conference. “I’m for it.”
Maya Bodinson contributed research to this story.
