The GOP’s Blueprint for Fair and Secure Elections

The ACE Act aims to fight the Left’s disintegration of our elections, while improving voting access and security

On Monday, House Republicans unveiled the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act of 2023, a roadmap for conservatives to take back the country’s elections endorsed by the Voter Reference Foundation.

The list of features in the bill (archived here) is immense and laudable—we’ve put the best below:

• Repeals Biden executive order 14019 ordering federal agencies to engage in voter registration and mobilization, and bars them from doing so in the future;

• Bans private funding for elections, a scheme conjured by Mark Zuckerberg in 2020 to boost Democratic turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic;

• Preserves donors’ right to privacy under NAACP v. Alabama and AFPF v. Bonta;

• Terminates Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board and prohibits any other federal agency from recreating anything like it;

• Requires first-time voters who’ve registered by mail to provide ID before voting by mail;

• Prohibits same-day voter registration, giving time for election officials to verify a new voter’s application;

• Bans non-citizen voting, a recent development in some Democrat-run localities—and same-day voter registration, streamlines the process for states to remove them from their voter rolls, and makes it a crime for foreign citizens for contribute to local ballot initiatives and races;

• Instructs certain federal agencies to provide states voter data for free to remove ineligible and dead voters from their rolls;

• Requires states to preserve ballots, ballot images, ballot envelopes, and other election materials for 22 months after a federal election, and increases citizen access to these documents;

• Commissions a feasibility study on manufacturing all voting equipment in the United States; and

• Declares that Congress should play “a very limited role in congressional redistricting,” leaving the process up to states as directed by the Constitution.

The Right Strikes Back

The most amusing blow to the Left is the ACE Act’s goal of making the District of Columbia—which is controlled by Congress—a model of election integrity.

In D.C., the bill mandates voters show a photo ID to vote in-person or by mail; bars the district from mailing out ballots except upon a voter’s request; bans same-day registration, ballot harvesting, and ballot drop boxes; prohibits non-citizen voting and ranked-choice voting; and improves security concerning ballot verification, bipartisan poll watchers, and provisional ballots.

This is a terrific, realistic start—but we must go further.

Mass voting by mail has transformed Election Day into Election Season, which creates innumerable opportunities for mischief. Public trust in election outcomes is in free-fall. This is all to the benefit of the Left. Conservatives are forced to use vote-by-mail and ballot harvesting if they want to win in 2024 and 2026, but we cannot lose sight of the true goal: Restoring our elections as they should be.

Read Doug Truax’s vision for restoring America’s elections here

Nevertheless, this is a tremendous foundation for advancing the election integrity movement. No one expects it to pass the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House, nor is it meant to. The ACE Act is a declaration of the Republican Party’s vision for safeguarding this nation’s elections—and rolling back the Left’s taint once and for all.