MADISON, Wis. — In a letter to the editor published today by the Cap Times, a voter in Bryan Steil’s 1st Congressional District demands that the congressman get his priorities straight by focusing on bringing costs down instead of his endless attempts to push forward legislation that would make it more difficult to vote. This comes right before the one year anniversary of Bryan Steil’s rubber-stamp of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill, which robs Wisconsinites blind, on top of increasing costs of groceries, gas, and housing costs.

Cap Times: Steil Needs to Abandon His Vote Suppression Efforts
By: Jerry Hanson | 7/02/26

Dear Editor: U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil has introduced “The Voter ID Act “ to strengthen voter confidence and restore trust in our elections. Unfortunately Steil‘s claim that Americans lack confidence in our elections is false.

Americans have significantly more confidence in our elections than they do in Congress. Public faith in election integrity hovers near 70%. Trust in Congress remains drastically lower, resting near 12%.

Our elections are so decentralized and with safeguards, transparency and verification systems that any fraud that does occur is either detected and reversed or on a scale too small to make a difference.

A count of voter fraud cases in the six battleground states in 2020 by the Associated Press found fewer than 475 votes in all six states combined were possibly fraudulent. Most were not counted and not all were for one candidate.

The AP study found no systematic collusion or rigging in those cases. A database search of billions of ballots cast over 40 years of U.S. elections found roughly 1,000 individual examples of possible voter fraud.

These isolated occurrences of fraud are almost always caught by the systems designed to do so and will never rise to the level that changes election results. The amount of fraud is not zero but it very close to zero.

Steil’s bill, along with his authoring of the SAVE Act, isn’t meant to secure elections. It is meant to ensure certain Americans cannot access the ballot easily.

Steil needs to understand that the path to winning elections is to persuade, not to disenfranchise people from voting.

Steil’s focus should be on the people in his district struggling to make ends meet, not on stopping people from voting.