WASHINGTON – House Republicans are proposing sweeping changes to the nation’s voting laws, a long-shot priority for President Donald Trump that would impose stricter requirements before Americans vote in the midterm elections in the fall.
The package expected to be released Thursday reflects some of the party’s most sought-after election changes, including requirements for photo IDs before people can vote, proof of citizenship and prohibitions on universal vote-by-mail and ranked choice voting — two voting methods that have proved popular in some states. The Republican president continues to insist that the 2020 election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged.
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“Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” said Rep. Bryan Steil, chairman of the House Administration Committee, in a statement.
“These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat,” said Steil, R-Wis.
The legislation faces a long road ahead in the narrowly-split Congress, where Democrats have rejected similar ideas as disenfranchising Americans’ ability to vote with onerous registration and ID requirements. The effort comes as the Trump administration is turning its attention toward election issues before the November election, when control of Congress will be at stake.
The administration sent FBI agents Wednesday to raid the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, seeking ballots from the 2020 election. That follows Trump’s comments earlier this month when he suggested that charges related to that election were imminent.
Republicans are calling their new legislation the “Make Elections Great Again Act” and say their proposal should provide the minimum standard for elections for federal offices.
According to a one-page bill summary, the measure includes requirements that people present a photo ID before they vote and that states verify the citizenship of individuals when they register to vote. It would require states to use “auditable” paper ballots in elections, which many already do.
The legislation would require that only mail-in ballots received in the states by the close of polling on Election Day could be counted, with an exception for those ballots from overseas military personnel. It would prohibit the mailing of ballots to all voters through universal vote-by-mail systems.
Similar proposals have drawn alarm from voting rights group, which say such changes could lead to widespread problems for voters.
For example, prior Republican efforts to require proof of citizenship to vote have been criticized by Democrats as disenfranchising married women whose last names do not match birth certificates or other government documents.
The Brennan Center for Justice and other groups estimated in a 2023 report that 9% of U.S. citizens of voting age, or 21.3 million people, do not have proof of their citizenship readily available. Almost half of Americans do not have a U.S. passport.
Trump has long signaled a desire to change how elections are run in the United States and last year he issued an executive order that included a citizenship requirement, among other election-related changes.
At the time, House Republicans approved legislation, the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act,” that would cement Trump’s order into law. That bill has stalled in the Senate, though lawmakers have recently revived efforts to bring it forward for consideration.
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Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.