The Sweeping Elections Changes House Republicans Are Proposing

House Republicans have proposed sweeping changes to voting laws ahead of the fall midterm elections that would create additional hurdles for voters.

An elections reform bill unveiled Thursday, called the “Make Elections Great Again Act,” would impose new requirements for Americans to register and cast their ballots and restrict mail-in and ranked-choice voting, among other provisions. Some changes would take effect immediately, while others would kick in next year.

The measure, which is supported by a number of conservative advocates for elections reform, faces an uphill battle given Republicans’ thin congressional majorities and Democrats’ opposition to similar proposals in the past, making it a long shot for ever becoming law.

Republicans have pushed for several of the changes in the bill for years and have introduced legislation including similar proposals in the past, including the American Confidence in Elections Act, which Steil sponsored in the summer of 2023. President Donald Trump has also repeatedly expressed his desire to enact election reforms. Trump signed an Executive Order seeking to require proof of citizenship for voters, among other changes, last year, though the order was later blocked in the courts. Another piece of legislation that would require such proof, known as the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” or SAVE, is awaiting a Senate vote after passing the House last April. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday that a version of that measure would be brought up for a vote in the upper chamber “at some point.” 

The new reform bill’s introduction comes as Republicans are preparing to defend their congressional control in the November midterms, and as Trump has reiterated his false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” on multiple occasions in recent days. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) agents raided the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, on Wednesday, for ballots from the 2020 election, escalating the Administration’s efforts to pursue Trump’s baseless allegations of fraud.

“Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” said Republican Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Administration Committee, who is leading the bill. “These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”

Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the committee, vowed in a statement to “fight this bill at every turn.”

“President Trump and House Republicans are terrified of the American people. They are desperate to rig the system so they can choose their voters,” Morelle said. “This bill is their latest attempt to block millions of Americans from exercising their right to vote.”

Here’s what to know about the changes the bill would make.

Stricter requirements for registration and voting

The bill would require prospective voters to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote and to show photo ID before casting their ballots beginning in 2027.

Such requirements could prove challenging to meet for a number of American citizens. A Brennan Center for Justice survey found that 9.1 percent of Americans of voting age, or 21.3 million people, do not have readily available access to documents proving citizenship. Meanwhile, about half of U.S. citizens—roughly 146 million people—do not have a passport. And as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate that reflects their legal name as a result of changing their surname following marriage.

The bill also seeks to require states to use “auditable” paper ballots starting this year. The vast majority of states already do so, and nearly all votes are made with paper ballots: A 2024 Brennan Center study estimated that 98 percent votes would be cast on paper in the 2024 general election.

Also beginning this year, states would also be required to conduct routine voter list maintenance “in no case less frequently than once every 30 days, to verify the eligibility of registrants on the official list of eligible voters in elections” under the bill.

Restrictions on mail-in voting

The bill would require that mail-in ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day to be counted, with an exception for those from overseas military personnel. 

It would also bar states from sending mail-in ballots to all their voters starting this year, meaning to receive such a ballot a voter would have to request it.

Bans on ballot collecting and ranked-choice voting 

Ranked-choice voting would be prohibited in federal elections under the bill beginning this year. The voting method, under which voters can rank multiple candidates for a seat by preference rather than just picking a single top choice, is currently used in Maine and Alaska.

The measure would also ban the practice of collecting completed absentee or mail-in ballots and delivering them to polling locations via a third party, sometimes called ballot collecting or “ballot harvesting.” 

In the case of such collecting, a voter might fill out a ballot and then entrust it to another person to bring to a drop-off location or mail center. This practice is used often by people in remote locations, or the elderly. It can also be deployed as a strategy by political groups or campaigns to ensure that voters who requested absentee or mail-in ballots turn them in, with staffers or volunteers going to voters’ homes and offering to drop off their ballots for them. Trump has long opposed the practice.