Republicans, braced for losses, push more voting restrictions in Congress

Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) speaks alongside Republican lawmakers and activists during a news conference on the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Feb. 11, 2026. Steil’s bill would ban universal voting by mail and prohibit the counting of ballots received after Election Day. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

By ANNIE KARNI

The strict voter identification measure that Republicans have pushed through the House is just their opening salvo in a broader legislative effort aimed at keeping control of Congress this fall and helping to amplify the president’s false claims of mass voter fraud in the event that they lose.

The GOP’s relentless focus on the bill and an even more restrictive measure making its way through the House — both of which face a steep uphill path to becoming law — is aimed chiefly at intensifying pressure within their own ranks to muscle through new voting restrictions and seek to reshape the electorate in their favor.

But it also allows Republicans to hammer President Donald Trump’s falsehoods about widespread illegal voting particularly by immigrants in the country illegally, helping them build a case, however groundless, that any Democratic victories in November will be a result of cheating.

“As President Trump told me last week, it really will save America,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., recently told a right-leaning media outlet in Florida, of the push to enact the measure that passed the House. “If we don’t, we lose the midterms and we lose the country.”

Next up is a measure from Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the chair of the Committee on House Administration, whose “Make Elections Great Again Act” would go even further in imposing federal control over elections than the Save America Act, which squeaked through on a near-party-line vote last week. That bill would require proof of American citizenship to register to vote and allow the Department of Homeland Security to have access to voter rolls.

Republican proponents of Steil’s legislation have begun referring to it as the Save America Act, but on steroids.

Steil’s bill would ban universal voting by mail and prohibit the counting of ballots received after Election Day. It would ban ranked-choice voting for federal elections and would prohibit voters from giving sealed mail ballot packets to someone else for delivery, a practice allowed in 18 states.

It also would grant far more authority to the Department of Homeland Security to obtain information about voters from states. And it would reinforce the House-passed bill’s voter ID requirements, including establishing citizenship by requiring people to show a passport or a birth certificate to register and identification to vote.

“Elections should end on Election Day,” Steil said at a hearing last week, echoing an assertion Trump made repeatedly after his 2020 election loss.

At the hearing, Steil brought in three election deniers to make the case for the changes: Chuck Gray, the secretary of state of Wyoming, who claimed the 2020 presidential race was “illegitimate”; Ann Bollin, a state representative from Michigan who in 2020 signed a letter requesting an audit and investigation of election results in her state; and a senior lawyer with Judicial Watch, a conservative organization that has represented individuals challenging state election laws.

Democrats fear the bill could get fast-tracked to the floor, depending on what Trump tells House Republicans he wants them to do. And Speaker Mike Johnson has already stated that questioning the security of the upcoming elections is an issue he does not plan to let fade from voters’ minds.

“That is something that’s going to be a continuing theme here; it’s something we’ll continue to push,” Johnson told reporters earlier this month.

Johnson, who played a lead role in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has raised questions in recent days about three House Republican candidates from California who held leads on Election Day in 2024. He said they saw their advantages “magically whittled away,” when more mail-in ballots came in and were counted.

“It looks on its face to be fraudulent,” Johnson said without offering any evidence, even though none of those Republicans leveled any accusations of fraud when they conceded their races.

Johnson did not mention that Republicans also won districts in 2024 in part because of ballots that came in after Election Day. Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., for instance, won his seat in Colorado’s 8th District in 2024 in a tight race that wasn’t called for days as votes continued to come in and be counted.

Other Republicans in tight races in swing districts, like Rep. Young Kim of California, saw their leads grow substantially with votes tallied after Election Day.

Democrats argue the bills would disenfranchise millions of Americans by making it more difficult for some of their key constituencies — including women, legal immigrants, lower-income Americans and others who may lack the necessary documentation to meet the new requirements — to vote.

“The Make Elections Great Again Act is one strand of spaghetti, the Save America Act is another strand,” Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration panel, said in an interview. “They’re going to throw the whole bowl at the wall.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he saw the congressional efforts as part of a larger pattern that has included the president’s recent talk of nationalizing elections and his regret about not seizing voting machines in swing states after his loss in 2020. He said those efforts also included intimidating poll workers and most recently, dispatching Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to Fulton County, Georgia, to elevate false claims of voter fraud.

“We need just to face it head on,” Blumenthal said. “There’s no trick solution here. We have to tell voters that the way to overcome it is to turn out massively and make majorities large enough that he has no credible argument.”

Still, Senate Republicans are under increasing pressure from the hard right to do whatever is necessary to break through a filibuster and ram through the Save America Act on a simple majority vote over Democratic opposition.

So far, only two of the usual group of Republican holdouts to Trump’s agenda — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — have not signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, meaning it would have more than enough support to pass on an up-or-down vote.