The For the People Act, introduced in the House as H.R. 1, was a sweeping federal elections, campaign finance, and ethics bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives twice but never cleared the Senate. It proposed nationwide standards for voter registration and ballot access, independent redistricting, tighter campaign finance disclosure, a small-donor public financing system, and stronger ethics rules across the federal government. It has not been reintroduced in the 119th Congress, and the H.R. 1 designation in the current Congress belongs to an unrelated tax and spending measure.1Congress.gov. H.R.1 – 119th Congress (2025-2026) None of its provisions have been enacted into federal law.
What It Would Have Changed About Voting
The largest part of the bill set federal minimums for how Americans register and vote in federal elections. States could go further, but no state could fall below the floor.
Every state would have been required to run automatic voter registration. When an eligible citizen interacted with an agency like the DMV, their information would be forwarded to election officials and the person registered unless they opted out.2Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. H.R. 1 – The For the People Act Same-day registration would also have been mandatory, allowing people to register and vote on the same trip to the polls, including during early voting. Registration deadlines today range from Election Day itself to 30 days out depending on the state, and North Dakota does not require registration at all.
States would have had to offer at least 15 consecutive days of early in-person voting for federal elections, with polls open a minimum of ten hours each day. Existing early voting windows range from as few as three days to more than 40. On mail voting, the bill barred states from restricting who could request an absentee ballot and required free return postage for ballot materials.2Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. H.R. 1 – The For the People Act About 19 states and the District of Columbia already cover return postage; in the rest, voters typically pay it themselves.
Instead of preempting voter ID laws, the bill required every state to accept a signed sworn statement as an alternative to photo identification. A voter without a qualifying ID could sign an affidavit attesting to their identity and still cast a regular ballot. Opponents argued the affidavit option would weaken election integrity; supporters pointed to research showing strict photo ID rules disproportionately affect low-income and minority voters.
Independent Redistricting Commissions
One of the bill’s most structurally significant provisions would have required every state to draw congressional district lines through an independent citizen commission rather than through the state legislature.3Brennan Center for Justice. Five Ways H.R. 1 Would Transform Redistricting The commissions were designed to be nonpartisan, with members drawn from both major parties and from independents. Maps would have had to meet criteria like compactness and respect for communities of interest, and maps drawn to favor or disfavor any political party were expressly prohibited. When the bill was introduced, only a handful of states used truly independent commissions.
Voting Rights After a Felony Conviction
The bill incorporated the Democracy Restoration Act, which would have restored the right to vote in federal elections to anyone who had completed a prison sentence for a felony conviction.2Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. H.R. 1 – The For the People Act State practices vary widely: some states restore voting rights automatically on release, others require completion of parole or probation, and a few strip rights permanently for certain offenses absent clemency. The provision would not have touched state-level rules; it applied only to federal elections.
Election Security
Every state would have been required to replace paperless electronic voting machines with systems that produce an individual paper record of each vote. Those paper records would then serve as the basis for risk-limiting audits, a statistical method that checks enough ballots to give high confidence that the electronic tally is correct. Risk-limiting audits are considered the gold standard among election security researchers because they can catch errors from software bugs, hardware failures, or tampering without a full hand recount. The bill also directed additional federal funding to state election infrastructure.
Campaign Finance
The campaign finance title addressed three related problems: undisclosed political spending, the outsized weight of large donors, and a regulatory agency too deadlocked to enforce the rules.
Disclosure of Dark Money and Online Ads
The bill’s DISCLOSE Act provisions would have required organizations that spend on elections to publicly identify donors who contributed $10,000 or more during an election cycle. That would apply to 501(c)(4) social welfare groups, trade associations, and other nonprofits that can currently run political ads without revealing their funding. The bill also incorporated the Honest Ads Act, extending existing disclosure rules for political ads on television and radio to online platforms. Digital platforms selling political ads with aggregate purchases above $500 in a year would have had to maintain a public database of those purchases.
Small-Dollar Public Financing
To reduce candidates’ reliance on large donors, the bill created a voluntary public financing system for House campaigns. Participating candidates would receive a 6-to-1 federal match on individual contributions up to $200. A $50 donation would produce an additional $300 in public funds. The matching money would come from a dedicated fund financed by a surcharge on corporate and bank settlements of civil and criminal penalties, not from general tax revenue.
Restructuring the FEC
The Federal Election Commission’s six-member structure, split evenly between the parties, has produced repeated partisan deadlocks because any three commissioners can block enforcement. The bill would have reduced the FEC to five commissioners with no more than two from the same political party, so every vote would require at least one commissioner from outside the majority party or an independent to break ties. A nonpartisan advisory panel would recommend nominees, and enforcement procedures would be tightened to keep commissioners from shutting down investigations at the outset.
Foreign Influence
Federal law already bars foreign nationals from contributing to or spending on American elections.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 52 U.S. Code 30121 – Contributions and Donations by Foreign Nationals The bill tightened those restrictions and targeted newer avenues of foreign influence, particularly digital advertising and social media, aimed at gaps that surfaced after the 2016 election cycle.
Ethics and Transparency
Every presidential and vice-presidential candidate would have been required to publicly release ten years of federal income tax returns, posted on the FEC’s website. For roughly 40 years before 2016, candidates from both parties released their returns voluntarily, but no law required it. A House amendment expanded the requirement to include business tax returns.
Senior officials would have been barred from accepting “golden parachute” payments from former employers when entering public service, and the cooling-off period before former members of Congress and senior officials could lobby their former colleagues and agencies would have been extended. Under existing law, former House staff face a one-year restriction on contacting their previous office.5House Committee on Ethics. Negotiations for Future Employment and Restrictions on Post-Employment for House Staff
The bill also strengthened the Office of Government Ethics by giving its director final authority over executive branch ethics waivers and the power to investigate potential violations.6Congress.gov. Congressional Research Service – Office of Government Ethics Overview And it required a binding code of conduct for Supreme Court justices. When the bill was first introduced, the Supreme Court was the only federal court without a formal ethics code. The Court adopted a voluntary code in late 2023, though its critics noted the code lacks an enforcement mechanism, which is the gap the bill would have filled.
Constitutional Objections
Supporters grounded the bill in Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to “make or alter” regulations governing the “times, places and manner” of federal elections.7Legal Information Institute. Article I Under this Elections Clause, Congress has long set rules such as the uniform federal Election Day.
Opponents argued the bill went beyond procedural rules and dictated the substance of state election administration, effectively federalizing areas traditionally left to state legislatures. Several state attorneys general signaled Tenth Amendment challenges to provisions like the redistricting mandate.
The donor disclosure provisions drew a separate line of attack under the First Amendment, rooted in Supreme Court decisions holding that compelled disclosure of members or donors can violate freedom of association. The ACLU, usually an ally of voting rights legislation, publicly opposed the DISCLOSE Act and Stand by Every Ad Act pieces of the bill, arguing that the definition of “campaign-related” speech was vague enough to reach ordinary issue advocacy and that requiring groups to display their top donors on every political ad would chill protected speech across the political spectrum.
Why It Never Became Law
Representative John Sarbanes of Maryland introduced the For the People Act as H.R. 1 on the first day of the 116th Congress in January 2019. The House passed it on a party-line vote in March 2019.8House of Representatives Committee on Rules. H.R. 1 – For the People Act of 2019 The Republican-controlled Senate never brought it to a floor vote; then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called it a “power grab.”
The bill was reintroduced as H.R. 1 in the 117th Congress in January 2021 and passed the House on March 3, 2021, by a vote of 220 to 210, with every Republican opposed and all but one Democrat in favor.9Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. Roll Call 62 – Bill Number HR 1 Its Senate companion, S. 1, had White House support but could not overcome the 60-vote threshold needed to break a filibuster. Democratic senators reworked portions of the bill into the Freedom to Vote Act, a scaled-back compromise aimed at attracting bipartisan support.10Congress.gov. S.2747 – Freedom to Vote Act That effort also failed after the Senate declined to modify filibuster rules to allow a simple-majority vote on election legislation.
The For the People Act has not been reintroduced in the 119th Congress, and none of its provisions have become federal law. Individual pieces, such as automatic voter registration and independent redistricting commissions, have been adopted by various states through their own legislation.