House Republicans plan to advance legislation on Thursday that would increase burdens on voting, ease restrictions on money in politics, and completely rewrite election law for the District of Columbia.
The American Confidence in Elections Act aims to nationalize some of the voter suppression policies that Republican-run states passed after President Donald Trump lied about voter fraud in 2020 as part of a scheme to steal the election.
With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, the bill has no chance of becoming law. In the previous Congress, Democrats made legislation to expand the right to vote and disclose dark money their top legislative priority. That bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, was blocked by a GOP filibuster after then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to support changing the Senate’s filibuster rules.
The House Administration Committee will hold a markup on the bill on Thursday. By advancing the bill, Republicans show they are still playing to the false distrust in election administration fomented by Trump and hundreds of other elected officials who lied about the credibility of mail-in voting and the results of the 2020 election. At the time, 139 House Republicans voted to challenge the Electoral College votes of states where Trump had tried to discredit the results, even after he had provoked an insurrection.
“Rather than holding election deniers accountable, Republicans have written an extreme bill that restricts the freedom to vote and brings more money with less transparency into our elections,” Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said in a statement to HuffPost. “This Republican bill would undermine the voices of Americans and instead empower corporate special interests. We should reject it and instead pass the Freedom to Vote Act to protect and strengthen our democracy.”
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The ACE Act would repeal President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote voter registration, including by allowing voter registration when eligible voters access other services provided by federal agencies.
It would also prohibit states from receiving federal funds to administer elections unless they ban third-party ballot collection. Many states allow third parties, like campaigns, political parties and activist groups, to collect mail-in ballots and deliver them to the post office or a ballot drop box. Republicans have claimed for years that Democrats use this practice to cheat in elections, but have not produced any real evidence.
The only serious case where a campaign abused the third-party ballot collection process in a federal election was when the House campaign of Mark Harris, a North Carolina Republican, falsified absentee ballots collected by a consultant to win a GOP primary election in 2018.
The bill would also impose new requirements for voter identification during the initial registration process and for registered voters who request a mail ballot.
States that allow noncitizen voting in local elections or that contain municipalities that do so would be penalized by a reduction in federal election administration funds and an increase in their paperwork burden through a requirement that they use separate ballots and more extensive record-keeping systems.
No state allows noncitizen voting, but a handful of municipalities in California, Maryland and Vermont do allow noncitizens to vote in local municipal elections. Washington, D.C., also recently approved noncitizen voting for local D.C. elections. (It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections.)
On campaign finance, the bill would ban the federal government from requiring the disclosure of contributions to 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations that support or oppose political candidates. Instead of banning dark money by requiring disclosure, this provision bans dark money disclosure. The threshold for nonprofits to have to register with the IRS would be lifted from $5,000 to $50,000.
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The bill would also increase the campaign contribution limit for donors to state and national party committees, and eliminate any limits on a party’s spending in coordination with a candidate’s campaign.
The most extreme part of the bill, however, is its total rewrite of the District of Columbia’s election law, with the stated intention of using the federal district as a petri dish for conservative election policies aimed at making it harder to vote.
D.C. voters would be subject to a new requirement to show identification at the polls. Same-day registration would be banned. So too would third-party ballot collection, while restrictions would be placed on ballot drop boxes. Mail-in ballots would only count if they were received by the close of polls on Election Day. (D.C. currently counts ballots mailed by Election Day when they are received up to 15 days afterward.) Provisional ballots would need to be cast in a voter’s assigned precinct. Election officials would need to collect photos of every voter to be included in poll books.
The bill also seeks to preempt a proposed ballot initiative to create a ranked-choice voting system for D.C. by banning the method. It would also ban noncitizen voting.
Since D.C. lacks congressional representation, the residents have no say on this legislation. In a July 11 editorial, The Washington Post called the bill “an affront to the principle of home rule.”
Committee Democrats intend to offer their Freedom to Vote Act as an amendment in the form of a substitute during the bill’s markup on Thursday.
“There’s a clear contrast here between the two visions for what each party views for going forward with American democracy,” said Aaron Scherb, senior director of legislative affairs at Common Cause, a nonpartisan nonprofit. “One party wants to make it harder for Americans to vote and wants there to be more big money in politics, and the other party wants to make sure that all eligible Americans can vote and wants to make sure big money does not dominate politics.”