House Republicans are taking steps to ensure elections on the U.S. are above board.
To that end, an elections reform bill was unveiled that would require voters to present photo IDs when voting and citizenship verification to register to vote, according to The Hill.
The Make Elections Great Again Act is led by House Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.).
“Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity – including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” Steil said in a statement. “These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”
The bill also imposes restrictions on how states administer and maintain their election systems.
This issue came to light in the 2020 election when President Donald Trump claimed election fraud.
The bill would require mail-in ballots to be received by the close of polls on election day to be counted. Notable exceptions are made for members of the military serving overseas.
Several states allow mail-in ballots to be counted if received up to a certain point after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. This, however, led to delays in announcing election winners in states such as California where a majority of ballots are cast by mail.
It would require states to use auditable paper ballots for a federal election.
“Ballot harvesting,” the practice of collecting completed ballots and delivering them to polling centers, would be prohibited for anyone who is not an immediate family member or caregiver of a voter. It would also prohibit someone from distributing or delivering more than four mail-in ballots at a time.
The announcement of the bill comes after Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said another GOP elections bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, will come to the Senate floor “at some point.”
Thune said lawmakers are working to add a requirement ensuring only residents can cast a ballot.
The Make Elections Great Again Act is endorsed by many conservative election reform activists.
“I’ve spent the last decade registering voters across the country and empowering Americans to vote. Without fair elections, we aren’t a free nation,” Scott Presler, founder of Early Vote Action, said in a statement. “Thank you to Chairman Steil for his leadership on comprehensive election reform. Let’s make elections great again!”
Jason Snead, director of Honest Elections Project Action; J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation and commissioner on the United States Commission of Civil Rights; and Justin Riemer, president and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections all gave it a thumbs up.
