Election oversight continues to dominate, divide House Administration panel

With less than two months to go before November’s elections, Republicans on the House Administration Committee are keeping up a drumbeat: Are we ready?

That’s what they plan to ask six secretaries of state at a hearing Wednesday, including those from the battleground states of Arizona and Michigan.

Since Chairman Bryan Steil took the reins in 2023, the panel has emphasized its oversight of federal elections, holding a series of hearings on the topic.

“We have been, I think, very successful in working forward key election integrity initiatives and highlighting this issue and calling to account some of the challenges we face as a country,” the Wisconsin Republican said in an interview last week.

In a sprawling legislative package introduced last year, dubbed the American Confidence in Elections Act, Steil and his GOP colleagues took aim at what they described as vulnerabilities in the system, proposing things like stricter voter identification requirements and blocking noncitizens from voting in federal elections, which is already illegal.

A related proposal ultimately gained traction. Standing beside former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago this spring, Speaker Mike Johnson teased a bill to require proof of citizenship to register to vote. After the panel advanced the so-called SAVE Act in May, the House passed it in July, and now it’s drawing attention again thanks to its inclusion in a stopgap spending bill.

Democrats have accused their colleagues of feeding false narratives about the legitimacy of the 2020 election and sowing fears about this November.

“They’ve allowed the former president to really set the agenda when it comes to elections in the committee,” said House Administration ranking member Joseph D. Morelle.

Asked what the panel would do this fall and for the remainder of the 118th Congress, Steil and Morelle described diverging priorities.

ActBlue, Bidenbucks

Steil has recently sought to put the spotlight on how online fundraising platforms accept political donations.

Last week, Steil and other House Administration Republicans introduced legislation aimed at preventing contributions made from prepaid cards, which they argue could be exploited by straw donors or foreign actors. It would also require political committees to collect the card verification value, or CVV, for credit and debit card contributions.

Steil sent a letter to Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue last year requesting more information about its CVV collection and other practices, and this summer urged the Federal Election Commission to boost donor verification requirements.

The measure will be marked up Wednesday, along with several other unrelated bills.

Steil has also called in five Biden administration officials for sworn depositions as part of his ongoing investigations into a March 2021 executive order aimed at promoting access to voting.

The executive order sought to expand ballot access to historically marginalized groups and instructed executive departments and agencies to partner with local officials to “eliminate discrimination and other barriers to voting, and expand access to voter registration.”

Steil said the executive order amounted to a “voter mobilization” effort favoring Democrats and that the use of federal resources for such purposes — what he calls “Bidenbucks” — could violate federal law prohibiting executive branch employees from engaging in certain forms of political activity.

Steil subpoenaed 15 Cabinet officials in June for their plans relating to the executive order. “I continue to have grave concerns that the conduct of this administration is in violation of the Hatch Act. And I’m at a loss for why the administration is refusing … to provide their strategic plan,” he said last week. “I’m going to continue working until I receive all 15.”

Democracy on the ballot

Meanwhile, Morelle and House Administration Democrats, who as minority members don’t set the committee’s agenda, have tried to highlight other election-related topics.

Morelle will host a meeting at the Capitol on Wednesday with leaders from the FEC and the Federal Communications Commission to talk about the growing impact of artificial intelligence on elections.

On Tuesday, he spoke at a press conference at the Capitol, joining other Democrats in promoting their signature voting rights bills, including one named after the late John Lewis and another that aims to boost ballot access among Native Americans.

And he’s recently made public calls for congressional Republicans to commit to certifying November’s election results, no matter the outcome.

“Democracy’s on the ballot,” Morelle said. “I’m very, very concerned that every American have the right to vote, that every American have access to the ballot, and that their ballots are counted.”

Revisiting Jan. 6

Separate from Steil, Georgia Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk has been leading a reinvestigation of the work completed by the select committee in the previous Congress that probed the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Loudermilk, who leads the House Administration Oversight subpanel, said he intends to continue that push and wants to see legislative action “to set the record straight so that [the select committee’s] report can’t be used anymore as fact.”

With the support first of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then Johnson, Loudermilk has led the effort to publish online all the estimated 44,000 hours of security footage captured that day as a pro-Trump mob overran the Capitol and tried to stop lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election. Much of that has now been uploaded, Loudermilk said Monday.

In a series of releases and a report issued earlier this year, he sought to cast doubt on the findings of the select committee. His investigation has been perhaps the panel’s most controversial line of business, and one that Steil has routinely refused to comment on, though he said last week that he “empowered” Loudermilk to undertake it.

Democrats have characterized it as an attempt to whitewash the events of the day and appease Trump.

“My objective has been to get to the truth and report the truth, and we haven’t tried to whitewash anything,” Loudermilk said. “Whether it’s been positive or negative toward Trump, we’ve been putting the information out.”

New member orientation

Looking beyond November, Steil said the committee would be exploring ways to improve the new member orientation traditionally held at the beginning of each Congress, though he didn’t elaborate on potential changes.

Oklahoma Republican Rep. Stephanie Bice, who leads the panel’s Modernization Subcommittee, has spoken about her frustration with the orientation process she experienced after being elected to Congress in 2020.

In a recent podcast appearance, Bice spoke about the need to create more engagement between new members across party lines and continuing opportunities for education.

Legislation to ban members from trading or owning individual stocks also falls within the committee’s purview, though Steil was noncommittal when asked if recent action in the Senate could spur similar activity in the House.

After years of agitation from outside groups and a cadre of legislators, a Senate committee in July advanced a proposal that would curtail members’ ability to trade. It remains to be seen whether the measure will get a vote on the Senate floor.

“I’ve always been working to try to seize an opportunity to build a consensus to put additional safeguards in place,” Steil said, when asked if his committee might take action in the coming weeks or months.

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