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SAVE Act reintroduced in Congress; it could prevent millions of married women from voting [1]
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Date: 2025-02-11
Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy has reintroduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE Act, which requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. The bill could prevent millions of married women from being able to vote.
The bill would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents (which themselves require a birth certificate to obtain) every time they register or re-register to vote. Since many married women take their husband’s last name, the name on their birth certificate won’t match their current name, thus preventing them from registering to vote unless they are able to go through the time and expense of getting a passport that will have their married last name. Nearly 146 million people in the U.S. currently do not have a passport.
Per the Brennan Center for Justice:
The SAVE Act would exclude millions of eligible American citizens who do not have ready access to the documentation it requires. According to a survey conducted by the Brennan Center and partners, more than 9 percent of American voting-age citizens, or 21.3 million people, don’t have a passport, birth certificate, or naturalization papers readily available. Voters of color, voters who change their names (most notably, married women), and younger voters would be most significantly affected.
Newsweek reports that as many as 69 million married women in the United States have changed their legal name since getting married, meaning their current name does not match the name on their birth certificate.
You may recall that in last year’s election, married Republican men were enraged with the thought that their wives might vote differently from them, so the SAVE Act helps take care of that concern. However, Newsweek notes that the bill could end up disenfranchising more Republican women voters, since a Pew study found that more Republican than Democratic women choose to change their name after getting married. Also, the states with the fewest number of people with passports are West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma — all deep-red states.
The Brennan Center notes that the SAVE ACT puts up many other roadblocks to voter registration.
The bill would functionally eliminate mail registration by requiring voters registering by mail to produce citizenship documents “in person” to an election official before the registration deadline. It would also abolish many or all voter registration drives and online voter registration systems, which are typically treated like mail registration. (Moreover, the bill does not contemplate copies or electronic records of citizenship documents.) And it would severely hamper automatic voter registration, as many of those transactions don’t occur in person while someone has citizenship documents with them. Address changes could be significantly impacted, too. Instead of your registration automatically updating when, for instance, you change your driver’s license address online, you might have to bring your passport or birth certificate to an election agency office to update your voter registration.
Last year the SAVE Act passed the Republican-controlled House but died in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and President Biden had vowed to veto the bill if it reached his desk. We can expect the outcome to be different this time around.
Despite the fact that the bill may end up harming Republican voters more the Democratic voters, I would assume that the GOP will be frothing at the mouth to pass this bill. It feeds into their efforts to suppress voting at all costs, and also into their clear objective to pull back women’s rights as much possible. So along with everything else we have to worry about this year, we’ll all need to gear up to fight this bill as best we can.
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