If MEGA Act Passes, These Voting Rights Act Protections Could Vanish

Last updated 1 day ago. Our resources are updated regularly but please keep in mind that links, programs, policies, and contact information do change.

This bill doesn’t repeal the Voting Rights Act. It creates rules that directly conflict with the VRA—you can’t follow both laws at the same time. When two federal laws contradict each other, one has to give way. If this bill passes, the protections that have safeguarded minority voting rights for nearly sixty years would vanish. Not through direct repeal, but by making it impossible to follow both laws at the same time.

Section 2: Banning Voting Rules That Harm Minorities

Since 1982, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has banned any voting rule that hurts voters based on race. You don’t have to prove anyone intended to discriminate—only that the practice has that effect.

The MEGA Act would gut this through its citizenship documentation requirement. Every voter would need to present documentary proof of citizenship to register: birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers.

This rule affects people of different races unequally—what Section 2 exists to prevent. But under the MEGA Act, states would be legally required to impose this barrier. A state trying to comply with Section 2 by accepting alternative forms of identification or allowing same-day registration without documents would violate the MEGA Act. A state complying with the MEGA Act would violate Section 2.

Section 203: Language Assistance Requirements

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires certain jurisdictions to provide materials in languages other than English: Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, Navajo, and Yup’ik. The law requires ballots, registration forms, instructions, and in-person assistance in the covered languages.

This bill would make this nearly impossible to maintain through two mechanisms.

First, it mandates that states create a “single, uniform, official, centralized, interactive computerized statewide voter registration list” controlled at the state level. Currently, each county runs its own voter list but shares information with the state. This allows a county with a significant Hmong population to tailor its language assistance program to that community’s specific needs—hiring Hmong-speaking poll workers, creating Hmong-language materials, conducting Hmong-language outreach.

Centralization shifts control to state capitals, where resources get allocated based on statewide percentages rather than local concentrations. A language group that represents 0.5 percent of a state’s population but 15 percent of one county’s population loses its dedicated support.

Second, the citizenship documentation requirement hits language-minority communities especially hard. Many citizens with limited English proficiency lack government-issued identification documents. They’re citizens—born here or naturalized—but they don’t have passports, and tracking down birth certificates or naturalization papers requires dealing with bureaucracies in a language they don’t speak fluently.

Section 203 jurisdictions would face an impossible choice: enforce the bill’s documentation requirements and watch eligible citizens unable to register, or help those citizens register and face federal lawsuits for non-compliance.

Section 208: Voter Assistance Guarantee

Any voter who needs help due to blindness, disability, or inability to read or write can receive assistance from a person of their choice under Section 208. The only restrictions: the person helping can’t be the voter’s employer or union representative.

A Texas court struck down state restrictions on who could help voters, ensuring that people with disabilities and limited English proficiency could receive help from whoever they trust at all steps of the process.

This bill would reverse that. It requires that only the voter, an immediate family member, or a caregiver can possess a mail-in ballot. That directly contradicts Section 208’s guarantee that voters can choose their own assistant. A voter who needs help from a neighbor, a community organizer, or a friend—all currently protected choices—would be out of luck.

The bill’s photo ID requirement creates another conflict. Section 208 presumes that voters unable to read are entitled to assistance. But requiring photo ID effectively forces voters with limited literacy to navigate the ID acquisition process, which involves forms, bureaucracies, and documentation.

The Centralized Database Requirement

Every state would need to create a single, centralized, state-controlled database that serves as the official list for all federal elections. This would be a major change from how elections work now, where states maintain databases for coordination but local jurisdictions retain significant control.

Currently, if one part of the election system breaks, other parts can still work. Some states use top-down systems where the state maintains the central platform. Others use bottom-up systems where local jurisdictions maintain their own lists and upload to a state system. Still others use hybrids. Because different states use different systems, if one gets hacked or breaks, the others keep working. Within states using distributed systems, compromised jurisdictions can conduct elections using backup systems.

This bill would eliminate that resilience. It requires checking voter registrations against federal databases like Social Security every 30 days—using systems with documented accuracy problems.

Database Accuracy Problems

The Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, which states would use to identify deceased voters for removal, contains significant errors. A 2015 audit by the SSA’s Inspector General found approximately 20,000 people erroneously listed as deceased. More recent SSA processing errors resulted in over $327 million in improper payments to beneficiaries after they died because the Death Master File had them listed as alive.

If the file says someone’s dead when they’re alive, that eligible voter gets purged from the rolls. Given the 30-day verification cycle, they might not discover their removal until Election Day.

The Department of Homeland Security‘s SAVE citizenship verification system has similar problems. Senators have warned about data quality issues with expanded SAVE use, including incorrectly flagging eligible voters as ineligible. USCIS hasn’t conducted sufficient testing to root out these errors.

This bill would force every state to use this unreliable system, running it every 30 days.

Private Litigation as a Voter Challenge Tool

The Voting Rights Act gives private individuals the right to sue when their rights are violated. This bill would create a different kind of private right of action: private citizens would be able to sue election officials who register a voter without the required proof of citizenship.

Private citizens would be able to sue election officials for registering voters who don’t have birth certificates or passports. Given the error rates in citizenship verification systems, many of these lawsuits would be based on wrong information—election officials registering eligible voters whom verification systems incorrectly flagged as noncitizens. But defending litigation, even when you win, imposes substantial costs on already under-resourced election offices.

“Forcing states to follow such strict federal rules not only stops eligible people from voting, but also ignores how under-resourced elections and secretaries of state are in general,” according to Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas.

The bill would simultaneously impose new compliance obligations on election officials and create private litigation mechanisms to challenge their compliance efforts, without providing resources to manage either responsibility.

Impact on Vote-by-Mail States

Eight states plus Washington, D.C., automatically mail ballots to every voter. This bill would ban universal vote by mail, forcing California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington to dismantle systems they’ve operated successfully for years.

Oregon has conducted elections entirely by mail for two decades. These states would need to develop new in-person infrastructure, new procedures for affirmative ballot requests, and new voter education campaigns. The costs would be substantial. The disruption would be enormous.

The ERIC System and Voter Data Sharing

States that participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center face different problems. ERIC is a system where states share voter information to catch errors and fraud, created over a decade ago by state election officials from both parties. It helps member states identify millions of out-of-date records and possible cases of double voting, improving accuracy in ways no other system has done.

Following the 2020 election, several Republican-led states withdrew from ERIC based on conspiracy theories about the system. They’ve attempted to build alternative systems, but those efforts have largely failed. The most prominent new initiative, the Alabama-led AVID system, lacks the sophistication of ERIC and isn’t even designed to allow multiple states to share data with each other—the core purpose ERIC serves.

The requirement to check voter registrations every 30 days using federal systems like SAVE would replace ERIC’s system where states share information to catch errors with a more rigid, federal database-dependent approach. But it wouldn’t solve the problems created by leaving ERIC. It would impose a uniform national solution that might work for some states but would create new conflicts for others.

The Supreme Court’s Uncertain Role

In 2023, the Supreme Court appeared to reaffirm Section 2’s vitality in Allen v. Milligan, upholding a map with an additional majority-Black congressional district as a permissible remedy for weakening the voting power of certain groups. But the subsequent case, Louisiana v. Callais, suggests the Court may be reconsidering even this limited protection.

In Callais, the Supreme Court reformulated the question from whether Louisiana’s congressional map was unconstitutionally gerrymandered to whether Section 2 itself remains constitutional. During oral arguments in January 2026, the Court’s conservative justices suggested they might weaken or eliminate Section 2.

This bill would interact with this uncertain legal environment in troubling ways. If the Supreme Court strikes down or substantially narrows Section 2, the bill’s provisions would operate in an environment where protections have been further weakened. If Section 2 survives, the private litigation mechanism combined with its verification mandates could systematically undermine enforcement by making it procedurally difficult for states to comply with both laws simultaneously.

The Court’s 2021 decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee already made it harder to use Section 2 by requiring people to prove the discrimination caused real harm, not just that it happened. This demanding standard has made enforcement substantially more difficult.

This bill would make it even harder by creating situations where compliance with its mandates makes Section 2 compliance impossible.

What These Protections Accomplish

Section 2 has blocked discriminatory plans, voter ID laws without adequate alternatives, polling place closures in minority neighborhoods, and registration restrictions that disproportionately affect voters of color. It’s been the primary tool for challenging discrimination since the Supreme Court eliminated the requirement that certain states get federal approval before changing voting rules in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder.

Section 203 has ensured that citizens who speak Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog, or Native American languages at home can participate in democracy without needing perfect English. It’s allowed communities to vote in their own languages, with assistance from people who understand their needs.

Section 208 has protected voters with disabilities, voters who can’t read, and voters with limited English proficiency from being turned away at the polls or forced to vote without help.

These protections have survived nearly sixty years of legal challenges, political opposition, and Supreme Court skepticism. This bill would eliminate them not through direct repeal but by creating rules that make it impossible to follow both laws at once.

Previous restriction efforts chipped away at the margins. This bill would create direct, operational conflicts between federal statutes—situations where states literally cannot comply with both the bill’s requirements and the Voting Rights Act’s protections simultaneously.

Courts might see this bill as effectively canceling parts of the VRA without saying so directly. Or they might find the laws contradict each other so badly that neither could be enforced. The MEGA Act is the first time Congress has tried to use a federal law to override the VRA—protections that have survived decades of scrutiny.

The outcome of that conflict would reshape access to the ballot in America for a generation.

Our articles make government information more accessible. Please consult a qualified professional for financial, legal, or health advice specific to your circumstances.