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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Forty Democratic members of the House and Senate issued a joint letter Wednesday to 19 states led by Democratic governors, urging them to block Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies from accessing driver’s license and registration data in their states.

The letter, led by Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., to follow the lead of states like New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington in pulling out of data sharing agreements with a state-led consortium known as The International Justice and Public Safety Network (NIets), a nonprofit that shares state data with police agencies.

 Doing so, the members argued, will protect citizens of their states from federal overreach by “federal agencies that are now acting as Trump’s shock troops.”

“This common sense step will improve public safety and guard against Trump officials using your state’s data for unjustified, politicized actions, while still allowing continued collaboration on serious crimes,” the congressional Democrats’ wrote.

Citing data provided to Congress by NIets, between Oct. 1, 2024 and Oct. 1 2025, the consortium processed over 290 million requests for state DMV data across 18,000 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments in the US and Canada. Those requests included nearly 300,000 from ICE and another 605,000 by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security.

While states can choose what data they share with NIets, the letter claims that the Arizona Department of Public Safety “provides law enforcement agencies outside your state with real time access to your state Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database, which includes driver’s licenses and other state issued ID cards” through NIets. This effectively means that whatever states share with Arizona are subsequently sent to law enforcement agencies around the country.

““To be clear, blocking agencies’ unfettered access to your state’s data through Nlets will not prevent federal law enforcement from obtaining information needed to investigate serious crimes, but taking these measures will significantly increase accountability and reduce abuse by permitting your state employees to review data requests from blocked agencies first,” the members wrote.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Public Safety referred CyberScoop to the Arizona Department of Transportation, which manages the state’s Motor Vehicles Division.

While all 50 states and Washington D.C. allow law enforcement to look up DMV data using a driver’s license number, at least 20 states and D.C. allow searches by name and date of birth, something congressional Democrats warned could facilitate broader dragnet-style surveillance.

Additionally, 41 states share driver’s license photos with law enforcement upon request, something that could feed facial recognition software programs around the country. Agencies like ICE have developed massive facial recognition databases that play a central role in immigration enforcement and citizenship validation, according to 404 Media, though it’s not clear if that database includes driver’s license photos.

Officials at DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency also made numerous technical updates this year to another federal database, the Systemic Alien Verification System (SAVE), to check the citizenship of voters. The database was altered to allow states to run bulk searches and merged with Social Security data, and the federal government has spent the past year collecting or demanding more state-level data on voters, including DMV information.

The letter urges Democratic governors to consult with their state NIets coordinator, stating the belief that due to technical complexities with how the system works and how requests are processed, many states may not even be aware of what they’re doing.

“Because of the technical complexity of Nlets’ system, few state government officials understand how their state is sharing their residents’ data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” they wrote. “Critically, it seems apparent that elected officials accountable to voters, including governors, attorneys general, and legislators have not been fully briefed on the current scale of state information sharing with ICE and other federal agencies, nor the availability of technical controls to restrict data sharing with these federal agencies.”

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