How Republicans Are Trying to Nationalize Voter Suppression

New Congressional legislation would have widespread chilling effects on the right to vote.

We’ve seen and heard the Trump Administration deploying false claims about immigrants as a pretext to infringe on Americans’ rights, and now that could include our right to vote. When this week President Trump told a rightwing podcaster that Republicans want to “nationalize the voting,” he gave voice to a concentrated MAGA effort to change how American elections are run.

House Republicans just unveiled a sweeping elections and voting bill they’re calling the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act. If passed, the legislation would codify extreme voting restrictions that extend far beyond previous attempts by congressional Republicans to limit access to the ballot. On his platform X, Elon Musk, who is back to spending millions to elect Republicans to Congress, posted in support of the bill, writing: “GET IT DONE TO SAVE AMERICA.”

“This isn’t about election integrity,” Christina Harvey, executive director of Stand Up America, a pro-democracy and anti-corruption organization, told me. “It’s about self-preservation. The American people are turning against Donald Trump over his chaotic immigration crackdown in Minnesota, his corruption, his failure to address the affordability crisis. Trump knows his poll numbers are tanking, his agenda is increasingly unpopular, Republicans could experience major losses at the polls in November, so enter voter suppression.”

The MEGA Act would restrict voting rights using tactics that Republican officials have long pushed on the state level – requiring very specific photo IDs and limiting mail-in ballots, for example – but also in novel ways that fit into the Trump Administration’s general push toward consolidating its own power under the pretext of “securing” America against the “threat” from noncitizens. The MEGA Act incorporates provisions from another Congressional voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act, and takes it several steps further. Among other alarming provisions, the MEGA Act would make the Department of Homeland Security a clearinghouse for deciding which Americans get to vote.

According to Junior Rivas at Democracy Docket, the MEGA Act would also:

• Impose strict photo ID requirements to vote

• Create a centralized voter surveillance system in every state

• Mandate constant voter roll purges

• Bar states from counting ballots that arrive after Election Day

• Ban universal mail voting (when states mail a ballot to all registered voters)

• Bar federal funding for voter registration by nonprofits

• Unleash lawsuits against election officials

As Harvey told me, “Republicans say this legislation is about making sure that people who aren’t citizens can’t vote, but that’s already illegal, and the penalties are quite stiff. It’s really about tricking Congress into stopping millions of citizens who are eligible from voting.”

To understand where the MEGA Act fits into the MAGA agenda, first it helps to know a few facts about the sponsor who unveiled it, Rep. Bryan Steil (WI-01), a Republican who sits on the House Financial Services Committee and whose biggest industry donor is the securities and investments industry. As chair of the House Administration Committee, which oversees matters related to elections, Steil hired a former Trump campaign staffer tied to fake electors who tried to falsify the results of the 2020 election. He’s also comfortable enough with election denial that on several occasions he’s teamed up with Rep. Jim Jordan, who infamously pushed stolen election rhetoric after 2020.

And in 2023, Steil launched the politically motivated House investigation into ActBlue, the online political donation platform that raises funds for Democratic candidates. During the investigation, which is ongoing, Steil and his allies in Congress have issued subpoenas for donor records and for individual ActBlue employees to appear for depositions. So, that’s who unveiled the MEGA Act.

Republicans have been passing voter restrictions for years. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, Karl Rove and other Republican operatives helped funnel wads of corporate money from companies including Altria Group (Philip Morris’s parent company), Citigroup, AT&T, and the Chamber of Commerce to state races ahead of the all-important redistricting year. Republicans took control of state legislative races across the country. That led Republican lawmakers – put in office by even more corporate donors – to initiate waves of voter suppression bills as Republican lawmakers pushed gerrymandering and state-level restrictions, like voting ID laws.

State lawmakers introduced hundreds of those bills during the 2010s. Since Trump popularized the Big Lie, his supporters have raced to pass even more voter suppression laws. According to Stand Up America, between 2021 and 2024, at least 79 laws in 19 states were enacted to restrict access to the ballot box. Now, Republicans in Congress are nationalizing those efforts.

If enacted, both the SAVE Act and the MEGA Act would nationalize those anti-voting policies. Harvey says that would “upend some states’ entire system of voting,” and disenfranchise a huge number of Americans, particularly women and rural voters. The requirement to show a specific government ID like a passport or birth certificate is onerous for millions of people. Harvey cites the fact that 69 million Americans don’t have a birth certificate with their current name on it, and the majority of those Americans are married women. Roughly half of Americans don’t have a passport.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, with heightened ID requirements just to register to vote, millions of rural voters would have to drive long distances to reach elections offices to show documentation to prove their eligibility – which could mean up to four hours of driving for Americans living in eight Western states.

One provision in the MEGA Act is especially chilling given the reality of the Trump Administration and the current violent political climate in the United States. The legislation requires states to conduct automatic voter eligibility checks through databases every 30 days, which could lead to eligible voters being purged from the rolls by mistake. That’s not all. Harvey explained that the bill also requires the state to publish the name of the person who has been purged from the voting rolls.

So, if enacted, the MEGA Act opens the door to the possibility that a citizen’s name could be mistakenly publicly posted as someone who has fraudulently sought to vote. Harvey pointed out that this poses heightened risks to people of color and naturalized citizens. Given the possibility of doxxing, the existence of neo-Nazi groups that have already targeted immigrant communities, and the Trump administration’s consistent anti-immigrant rhetoric, for some American citizens, the risks are very high.

Back in 2010, just after the Citizens United decision, banks and fossil fuel companies knew they had a financial stake in electing Republican lawmakers, the same lawmakers who would go on to propose voter suppression bills. Sixteen years later, the connection between Big Money and anti-voting bills has become even more brazenly corrupt.

Last spring, when Congress was considering a version of the SAVE Act, Elon Musk – who had just spent $291 million electing President Trump and a Republican Congress and whose company SpaceX has received at least $38 billion in federal funding and contracts over many years – shared Speaker Mike Johnson’s X post about the importance of passing the SAVE Act “ensuring only American citizens vote in federal elections.” Musk wrote: “Those who oppose this are traitors All caps: TRAITORS What is the penalty for traitors again?” And now Musk is back, spending millions to elect Republicans, and cheering on their attempts to limit our right to vote.

You can tell your representatives in Congress that you oppose the MEGA Act here.