MEGA Act and SAVE Act Spark Debate Over New Voting Restrictions

In a significant push to reshape America’s electoral framework, House Republicans have unveiled a series of legislative proposals aimed at strengthening election security, including two major bills they claim will combat voter fraud and enhance election integrity.

The proposals—the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act and the more comprehensive Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act—represent the culmination of Republican efforts to address what the party describes as vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting system.

House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil has positioned the MEGA Act as essential for rebuilding voter confidence. “This legislation includes commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” Steil said in a statement defending the proposal. He characterized the reforms as making elections “easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”

While the SAVE Act maintains a narrower focus, it would create substantial new requirements for voter registration. The legislation would mandate proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections and impose stricter verification standards for mail-in registration applications. States would also face additional responsibilities to ensure non-citizens are prevented from joining voter rolls.

The MEGA Act goes considerably further. Beyond citizenship verification provisions that mirror those in the SAVE Act, the bill would establish national voter ID requirements, force more aggressive voter roll maintenance procedures, and significantly reshape aspects of federal registration law.

Critics have raised concerns about the scope of these proposals. Stephen Richer, an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute, warned in a recent analysis that the legislation threatens to undermine state authority over elections—a principle long enshrined in American federalism.

Richer pointed out that the proposal would effectively prohibit universal mail-in voting systems currently operating in several states, including Utah, California, and Oregon. It would also prevent states from counting mail ballots that were sent by Election Day but arrived afterward, and would ban the practice of voters giving sealed mail ballots to neighbors for delivery—something currently permitted in 18 states.

“These changes fundamentally restrict states’ traditional discretion over election administration,” Richer argued, suggesting the proposals contradict conservative principles of limited federal government.

The debate over these bills highlights a fundamental question: Are such measures necessary to address a widespread problem? Non-citizen voting in federal elections is already prohibited under both the U.S. Constitution and existing federal law. In 1996, Congress passed legislation explicitly barring non-citizens from voting in federal elections.

Evidence of non-citizen voting remains statistically negligible. A 2025 Brennan Center for Justice analysis examining Louisiana voter rolls discovered approximately 30 suspected non-citizen votes out of roughly 23.5 million ballots cast across multiple election cycles—representing about 0.0001 percent of total votes.

Conservative policy organizations, however, maintain that election safeguards shouldn’t be evaluated solely on violation frequency. The America First Policy Institute has advocated for photo ID requirements, strict ballot-harvesting restrictions, and firm ballot return deadlines as essential security measures regardless of how rarely violations occur.

The institute recently published a state-by-state assessment ranking election systems by their perceived security levels. States with more permissive voting access policies, such as Oregon, California, and New York, received lower security ratings, while states with stricter voting regulations, including Florida, Tennessee, and Montana, were ranked as more secure according to the organization’s criteria.

As congressional debate intensifies, these competing perspectives illuminate the central tension in America’s ongoing election reform conversation: how to strike an appropriate balance between ensuring voter access, respecting state autonomy, and maintaining public confidence in election integrity—particularly as lawmakers consider expanding federal oversight of a system traditionally managed by individual states.

The outcome of these legislative efforts could significantly reshape how Americans participate in future elections, with profound implications for both election administration and voter access across the country.