Republicans in Congress are moving ahead with two pieces of legislation this week that would dramatically reshape the nation’s election laws.

Together, the SAVE America Act and MEGA Act would shift key voter certification powers to the executive branch,  require stricter proof of citizenship for voter registration, and allow states to more easily access federal immigration databases to track and remove “potential” or “suspected” noncitizens from voter rolls.

The SAVE America Act passed through the Rules Committee late Tuesday on a 9-4 partisan split, teeing up a full house vote on the bill. The bill would require voters to use a passport, birth certificate or REAL ID to register to vote and requires voters to prove their identity and citizenship in person.

Changes to the committee bill include a new section requiring states to send lists of all eligible voters to the Department of Homeland Security’s Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements database and placing the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration at the head of a federal voter citizenship certification process.

Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., said a manager’s amendment filed overnight would also exempt overseas military voters and their families from in-person identification requirements and make the law effective immediately.

Additionally on Tuesday, the House Committee on Administration held a hearing on another bill, the MEGA Act, also sponsored by Steil. That bill would discount all mail-in ballots received after the close of polls on Election Day, require the Attorney General to certify election funding for states, and authorize the AG to sue states that don’t comply with federal election requirements.

It would also allow private individuals to sue any election official “who registers an applicant to vote in an election for Federal office who fails to present documentary proof of United States citizenship.”

The data tells a different story

Steil cast counting ballots past Election Day as untrustworthy, comparing it to playing a corrupt card game.

“Imagine if you went to a casino and played cards and you’re playing with the dealer, and at the very end…the dealer says ‘You know what, I’m not going to flip over my cards for three or four days,’ ” he said. “You could be playing with the pope and you wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in exactly what is taking place.”

But the delays in counting ballots in three states in the 2020 election – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan – had a clear explanation: state laws prevented election officials from processing mail-in ballots until Election Day or the day before, forcing them to prioritize in-person votes first before moving to mail-in ballots – which ended up leaning heavily Democratic.

New research from the Center for Election Integrity and Research released this week found that many claims of suspected noncitizen voting are wildly inflated when investigated. Executive director David Becker said the data gives “a very good sense of the depth of the problem” around noncitizen voting, which he called “infinitesimally rare.”

“President Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security has checked more than 49 million voter records, and they themselves admit that 99.98% of those records represented confirmed citizens,” Becker said in a statement. “In several states that are politically aligned with President Trump, the number of alleged noncitizen voters has precipitously dropped when subjected to scrutiny.”

 Congressional Democrats unanimously opposed the bills, arguing they would disenfranchise legal voters in an effort to address a problem that post-election audits show  is exceedingly rare.

Rep.  Julie Johnson, D-Texas, said Congress must respect “the fundamental constitutional right of every citizen to cast a ballot.” That obligation would affect citizens without birth certificates or passports married women who have changed their names, and voters with limited access to election offices where they must provide citizenship in person.

“The problem with this bill is you’re putting all these administrative burdens in place to keep citizens from voting,” she said, adding later that “it is unamerican, unconstitutional, and just dead ass wrong.”

A decade of finger pointing 

It’s not clear what authorities or figures Steil was citing to justify the bill. For instance, approximately 98 percent of voters already cast their ballot on voting machines with a paper backup record.

Further, election experts don’t say winners must be declared on Election Day. Many argue the opposite: that calling races too early—or refusing to count ballots legally postmarked on Election Day but take days to arrive-—can disenfranchise legitimate voters.

The MEGA Act has support from GOP-controlled states. Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray told lawmakers Tuesday it would impose “baseline common sense standards” for elections nationwide. Gray also said he stood “in complete support of” President Trump’s March 2025 executive order on elections—though major sections of that order have since been struck down by courts for being unconstitutional. 

 After the 2016 election, Republicans resisted national election administration laws, arguing states should control election administration. 

Now, they face similar arguments about their legislative package.

Rep.  Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said it was “preposterous that the same Republicans who spent their entire careers demanding that states – not the federal government, states – should run their elections are now suddenly begging for federal intervention.”

Karen Brinson Bell, who led North Carolina’s State Board of Elections until last year, warned that the bill’s rigid photo ID mandates would override current systems even in most states—even those that already have voter ID laws. She also said the requirements would impose   a one-size-fits-all approach on election systems that have diverse, locally driven needs.

 “The needs of communities in Wyoming differ from those in Michigan and North Carolina,” Brinson Bell said. “Decentralized election administration is a feature, not a bug, of our democratic system.”

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The Department of Justice is suing Fulton County, Georgia and its election clerk over the county’s refusal to hand over voter records, part of a larger nationwide project to collect as much election and voter information as possible from state and local governments ahead of the 2026 and 2028 elections.

In a lawsuit announced Thursday, DOJ officials said they were suing Fulton County clerk of courts Ché Alexander, arguing that Alexander had a legal duty under the Civil Rights Act to hand over the information as the Department investigates what it claims are potential county violations of the National Voter Registration Act and Help America Vote Act.

In court documents filed with the Northern District of Georgia, Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division and Eric Neff, Acting Chief of the division’s voting rights section, argued that the court should not “adjudicate the factual foundation for, or the sufficiency of, the Attorney General’s ‘statement” or “the basis and the purpose’ contained in the written demand.”  They also argued the court should not scrutinize the scope of the data requested in the subpoena.

“The Attorney General need only show that she made a ‘written demand’ for records covered by Section 301 of the [Civil Rights Act] and that ‘the person against whom an order for production is sought … has failed or refused” to make such papers available for inspection, reproduction or copying,” wrote Dhillon and Neff.

In October, DOJ subpoenaed the county for “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.” It cited a request from the Georgia State Election Board to investigate “anomalies” in the 2020 election and the refusal of county officials to hand over the data or respond to federal demands.

The lawsuit against Fulton is one of dozens of lawsuits, investigations, and demands for voter data that the DOJ is pursuing ahead of the 2026 midterm and 2028 presidential elections.

On the same day it announced it was suing Fulton County, the Civil Rights Division added four more states – Colorado, Massachusetts, Hawaii and Nevada — to a growing lawsuit challenging election officials across the country to turn over voter registration data to the federal government. That brings the total number of states DOJ is suing to 18.

According to an online tracker created by the Brennan Center for Justice, DOJ has sent demands to at least 40 states for voter registration data since May, and most have rejected at least some, if not all, the requested records. Just two states, Indiana and Wyoming, have fully complied with the requests.

“Nearly all states that have replied to the DOJ’s requests have not shared their full voter registration databases,” wrote authors Kaylie Martinez-Ochoa, Eileen O’Connor and Patrick Berry. “Instead, most states have provided the publicly available version (which do not include Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers) or have not provided the voter registration lists at all.”

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