Your In Depth Guide to MESA (Make Elections Secure Act)

Representative Pete Sessions has sponsored a bill in the U.S. House straight from the dreams of every election integrity patriot in America. Can it pass, and how effective would it hypothetically be?

This week, I’ve received significant interest in my opinion of the Make Elections Secure Act (MESA), sponsored in the U.S. House by GOP Representative Pete Sessions of Texas (TX-17). In this overview, I will outline the pillars of Sessions’ proposed legislation, provide input on each, and candidly give my view not only on the likelihood of this passing both chambers, but also in evaluating its utility as productive and actionable legislation with regard to the 50 states and Washington, D.C., which contribute the 538 electoral votes, 100 Senate seats, and 435 House seats that come up for grabs in Federal elections.

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Here is the release from Sessions’ office, dated March 4, which I have shortened to exclude his commentary:

Congressman Sessions Lays Legislative Framework to Bolster Election Integrity

For Immediate Release

March 4, 2025

WASHINGTON, DC – Congressman Sessions today announced he is drafting landmark legislation entitled the Make Elections Secure Act (MESA) to align with President Trump’s commitment to make elections secure again. This legislation will address vulnerabilities in voter security through five key pillars:

1. Hand-Marked and Hand Counted Paper Ballots

MESA mandates the exclusive use of hand-marked paper ballots for all federal elections and primaries receiving public funds. This eliminates reliance on vulnerable electronic systems, ensuring a tamper-proof, human-verifiable process that reflects voters’ true intent.

2. Voter ID and Citizenship Requirements

The bill requires every voter to present a government-issued photo ID – such as a driver’s license, passport, or military ID – and sign an affidavit in the paper poll book affirming U.S. citizenship and single-voting intent under penalty of felony charges.

3. Shortened Early Voting

Early in-person voting is limited to three days prior to Election Day – the final Tuesday of voting – streamlining administration and concentrating resources for secure, manageable hand counts, while maintaining voter access.

4. Limited Mailed Ballots

Mailed ballots are restricted to active-duty military personnel stationed away from their jurisdiction and voters with physician-certified medical conditions preventing in-person voting.

5. Paper Elections and Small Precincts

MESA mandates paper poll books as the primary voter check-in method and caps precinct sizes at 1,500 registered voters, returning elections to community-based, transparent operations that facilitate efficient hand counting and local oversight.

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If all of this sounds familiar to you, as if you’ve read it here in the pages of Captain K’s Corner, then you are right to be pleased that election integrity warriors are making a tremendous difference. While I cannot personally take credit for this legislation, two allies and outright election integrity champions I’ve worked with for more than two years are to be credited for writing the legislation and presenting it for Sessions’ sponsorship. Those two gentlemen are Will Huff and Colonel (Ret.) Conrad Reynolds, a pair of Arkansas patriots helping steer the ship locally and nationally. These points are a dream listing straight out of my Ten Points to True Election Integrity, first published in 2022.

Here is my evaluation of each of Sessions’ five pillars of the MESA:

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Hand-Marked and Hand Counted Paper Ballots

In what should be a commonsense reform for all, this is a major win for those who have spent years digging into every technical manual and patent form under the sun, like David Clements. Ban All Electronic Voting Systems is listed second out of my ten points, behind only a full purge of fraudulent registrations and the requirement for continued maintenance of said database(s).

Some of you wonder why I go so hard on voter registration corruption and mail-in balloting instead of machines, and there are multiple reasons why I do this. First, I’m not a technical expert and can barely make a printer work. There are people who know a lot more about advanced technology and large cyber infrastructures, and I prefer not to create a massive cloud of confusion by stepping into their lanes. Second, I like to keep things simple and consider it my role to educate the layperson on the state of elections, rather than trying to further convince people who already agree with me.

Here is the key point, once again, about the machines: voters are essentially voting on black boxsystems that require voters to trust that all components of the electronics election infrastructure are relaying and thereby tallying choices as intended by the voters. You must trust that the county elections office, rather than having a giant stack of paper ballots anyone can verify, has an electronically compiled vote total that is untainted by even a single fraudulent vote. Multiple studies by multiple experts have shown numerous vulnerabilities, back doors, and ways to manipulate electronic voting in nefarious ways, and you don’t even need to try to convince someone your Trump vote was switched to a Biden vote to make this case. It’s all about transparency, and up until recently, it was the Democrats who made the exact case I just did.

Clearly, this point needs some edification with how to handle a return to primitive elections, which is partly addressed in point five, with enforcement of paper pollbooks for check-ins, and smaller precincts, which I’ll discuss shortly.

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Voter ID and Citizenship Requirements

Another no-brainer, but don’t expect your Democrat neighbors to do anything but call these points racist, xenophobic, and literally Hitler. I’m not a believer that blue states are blue because they lack Voter ID (registration and mail balloting are why many are blue), but they lack Voter ID because their entire set of election laws is so disparately unfair and rigged that it would naturally lack something as simple as Voter ID:

Additionally, I don’t think illegal aliens and non-citizens are voting in statistically significant numbers. I think, in states that have Automatic Voter Registration, they are being voted for. Regardless, this point is logical and will be a safeguard against voter fraud (which is different than election fraud, when government or other entities conspire to manipulate elections on a large scale). The fact that this needs to be put into legislation should create a sense of astonishment among fence sitters as to how inherently corrupt blue states are. This fits my third of ten points.

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Shortened Early Voting

When you stick your favorite dish into the oven, an essential part of the recipe is how much time is specified for how long your culinary masterpiece should stay in there. Likewise, delicately twisting election results in your favor, like the two Democrat “won” U.S. House seats from California decided in December, requires the key, but often forgotten, ingredient of time.

Combining extended voting periods, also known as time, with as many mail-in ballots as possible and legalized/non-penalized ballot harvesting creates what amounts to the equivalent of an adult Easter egg hunt.

You have six weeks. Mail-ballots went out today. Go hang out in the projects and in the densely populated downtown areas and use this data sheet as your harvesting guide. All 1,000 of you full-time activists reel in 100 ballots each, and we will net 100,000 more votes here in Philadelphia County than all trends, indicators, and predictors suggest should be possible.

Early voting wasn’t a widespread thing until the 1980s, when Texas authorized it for all with no excuse necessary. Now it has become sport, with 91% of the Lone Star State’s vote in 2020 cast prior to Election Day.

Sessions specifies three days of early voting in the run-up to Election Day. It is a little more lenient than I would like to see, but if there are exceptions on who is allowed to vote early, then I’m probably fine with it. My specifications for early voting, which (to ban) is my fifth of ten points, is for a select group of people such as doctors, nurses, pilots, truckers, or election workers, to have limited access to in-person early voting so as not to disenfranchise them from voting, but not to allow a massive window for exploitation via the blue state model.

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Limited Mail Ballots

Hallelujah, Church, say yes and amen. Get off of your dead asses and go vote in person. Is it really that convenient to vote by mail twice every other year if you are a primary voter? Or once every four years if you only vote in presidential elections? No, of course not. You go out into the big, bad world to get your hair done, drive golf balls, shop for groceries, pick up or drop off kids at school, and venture to the workspace. You mean to tell me you can’t go vote in person?

Voting by mail, which was inflicted on this nation by Oregon in the 1990s, has been banned by most first world nations throughout the world because it is wide open to election fraud. If you trust in mail elections, then please, put $500 in a self-addressed stamped envelope and send it to yourself, with a note on the envelope stating $500 cash inside. If you get it back, I’ll send you 5% on your investment. What better way to skirt in-person ID requirements and drum up artificial turnout for garbage candidates than to make up a passive system of “voting” that relies on a party’s ability to collect envelopes more than its ability to motivate voters to show up and elect its members themselves?

This point, which fully satisfies my fourth of ten points, captures exactly what I would want it to capture. Mailing in a ballot is a privilege reserved exclusively for overseas (or internally deployed) military members and those too infirm to show up and cast a vote in-person (although I believe a person should be mentally fit enough to make their own ballot choices without assistance or persuasion). This alone would strip away much of what makes the blue wall blue (Harris won 6 of 8 states with Universal Mail-In Voting in 2024, and Biden won 7 of 8 in 2020).

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Paper Elections and Small Precincts

This fifth pillar, which satisfies my sixth of ten points, is essential for making the entire proposal work. If we simply dump machines and mail-in voting and don’t have a working solution as a foundation, then we will quickly see public uproar over an inefficient system that functions worse than the original, which is sold as convenient for reasons of critical states having the ability to corrupt elections on an as-needed basis. One key way mega-counties, such as Maricopa County, have corrupted elections is by herding over 2.5 million registered voters under voting centers, and getting away from precinct voting, which is distinctly American in that it assembles communities to operate elections with little oversight and maximum engagement of their neighbors (who happen to know people and can spot weird activity or people who don’t belong there with greater ease).

Liz Harris recommended 1,200 registered voters per precinct in her 2021 treatise on Maricopa’s elections. Sessions proposes 1,500, which is also where Maricopa Recorder Justin Heap comes in for his recommendation. Either way, precincts of this size, rather than massive community voting centers and disguised central count tabulation centers that function as crime scenes, will allow for efficient and accurate processing of the precinct’s voter roll and the subsequent tallying of ballots by hand, which will require standardized training across the nation to implement.

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Is MESA Missing Anything?

The most important thing to clean up regarding our elections is the corruption of state voter rolls. Voter rolls are the foundation of election manipulation, and nothing makes it more clear to me than the stats regarding Automatic Voter Registration states versus non-Automatic Voter Registration states from 2024. Trump won the non-Automatic states 248 electoral votes to 5, with only New Hampshire (4) and Nebraska’s 2^nd Congressional District (1) going for Harris:

This was even worse in 2020, when Biden carried Automatic Voter Registration states (there were four fewer then) plus Washington, D.C. by a combined tally of 243 electoral votes to 9 (yes, nine). Conversely, North Dakota is the only state that lacks voter registration of any kind, and my models suggest it is the most impervious to election manipulation over the past three cycles on a trendline, differing from its southern neighbor, South Dakota, which suffers under corruption of its voter registration database thanks to a lobbyist-owned Secretary of State and those exploiting RV parks for residency.

Combining flooded voter rolls with expanded mail-in balloting and ballot harvesting is what keeps state blue. Look at Michigan for a prime example, where 83% of the population was registered to vote in 2024, when only 77% of any state population is over the age of 18 and therefore eligible to vote. Not directly addressing the voter rolls requires all five pillars of Sessions’ plan to be fully authorized and subsequently engaged for them to be effective in combating fraudulent elections. If we miss on the mail-in ballot pillar, then nothing will change in captured states like Washington, Oregon, and California because the loose registrations (credit line) will remain intact.

Voter rolls must be purged (or even better yet, eliminated North Dakota style) to really move the needle.

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What Will Opposition Look Like?

Aside from braindead RINOs in Congress and all Democrats, look for the blue states to raise holy hell and fling dust into the air over MESA (and, if passed by Congress, shop for judges to invalidate the act on 10^thAmendment grounds). The 10^th Amendment, although designed to maximize the freedom of the states where the Constitution provides no law, has been exploited by blue states – which have crafted their election laws to tip the scales in the favor of Democrats and thereby nullify the votes of red states, which have much stricter laws pertaining to election administration (and cleaner voter rolls to boot). Where I disagree with my friend and colleague Kris Jurski is with his position on the appropriateness of MESA. Jurski says this is an issue that belongs to the states, and while I agree in principle, they are using their freedoms to disenfranchise the rest of the nation and must be reined in for the betterment of the country (hence Sessions’ specification that the bill covers federal elections only).

There will be confusion, if this bill passes, as to how to operate an election with federal and state election rules differing from one another (for example, how do you run an in-person election for president but have mail ballots flying all over the place for state elections?). That means, as this proposal moves forward, there will likely be scores of aides and legislators taking hacks at it, which may dilute the original bill.

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The Verdict

I would not put high odds of Sessions’ bill making it through Congress, though I expect it to be embraced by President Trump, which enhances the odds of passage. Currently, Republicans hold a 218-214 majority (220-215 as elected) after the death of Democrat Sylvester Turner and pending final Cabinet confirmations. There are high odds that some dirtbag Republicans, especially from mail-in heavy states like Washington or California, will sandbag the effort, effectively killing it in the cradle. You can bet your bottom dollar the bill will be opposed by Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski in the Senate, but I still consider it worth the effort because this will get all members of Congress on the books for where they stand on a bill that is fundamentally the greatest piece of legislation regarding elections at the federal level ever produced.

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Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.