ATLANTA – House Republicans have introduced a bill aimed at securing election integrity across the country while also issuing a stark warning to Americans to watch out for possible Democrat deception surrounding the legislation.
Five Republican members of the Committee on House Administration (CHA) held a press conference at the famous Marietta Diner near Atlanta on Monday to officially roll out the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, something they say will give states the tools they need to not only protect the integrity of their elections, but also restore voter confidence in the elections process.
The bill includes a photo ID requirement to cast a federal election ballot, bars non-citizens from voting, requires annual maintenance of voter rolls, and prevents the mailing of unsolicited ballots to rolls that have not been maintained.
According to Committee chairman Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., the ACE act will make it ‘easy to vote and hard to cheat,’ and will give states access to federal resources to ensure they can do things as ‘simple’ as remove voters from voters roles upon their death.
‘It should be this simple,’ he said, later referring to the bill as ‘commonsense legislation’ and ‘a rational approach that Americans can get behind.’
Steil was joined at the Marietta Diner by fellow committee Reps. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., Stephanie Bice, R-Okla., Laurel Lee. R-Fla., and Mike Carey, R-Ohio, who each echoed Steil on the importance of the bill, and touted what their own states had done to combat voter fraud.
Loudermilk, who represents the district that includes Marietta, told attendees the bill put incentives in place for other states to pass bills similar to the voting law Georgia passed in 2021, S.B. 202, that set off a wave of criticism from Democrats, who dubbed it ‘racist,’ ‘voter-suppression,’ ‘Jim Crow 2.0,’ and ‘a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.’
The committee stressed the significance for the roll-out of the new bill to be in Georgia because of the vast damage the state endured following the backlash to its bill. The damage included the MLB moving the All-Star game from Atlanta, which resulted in what some estimates said was a more than $100 million hit to the local economy.
When asked by Fox News Digital if the committee expected any pushback from Democrats despite the ‘voter-suppression’ narrative surrounding Georgia’s bill being debunked after the state saw record turnout in the 2022 midterm elections, Steil didn’t parse words.
‘Rest assured, the left is going to attack this legislation. It’s one of the reasons I think it’s important that we’re here in Georgia, because we saw the left’s false attacks against voter integrity legislation previously,’ he said.
‘I have no doubt that the left is going to attempt to attack, to mislead, to disguise the work that we’re doing. It’s all the more important that we’re here in the open holding hearings, not just in Washington, D.C., but here in Atlanta, Georgia, and across the country so people have the opportunity to read, to review the legislation,’ he added.
Loudermilk emphasized a hypothetical scenario Steil cited earlier that under current laws in Washington, D.C., any person who spends 30 days in the U.S., including a Russian national working at the Russian embassy, would be eligible to vote in the city’s mayoral elections, or even run for mayor themselves.
Even if passed by the narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives, it’s unlikely the bill would advance through the Democratic controlled Senate or be signed into law by President Biden.
The bill follows Democrats’ own elections bill, H.R. 1, or the For the People Act, which passed the then-Democratic controlled House in March 2021, but failed to make any headway in the Senate due to a lack of unanimous Democratic support.