How the SAVE Act Advances a Hidden Agenda

Old ideas about women and voting are showing up around the SAVE Act fight

The SAVE Act has been all over the news lately, with President Trump pushing hard for Republicans to get the election overhaul passed by any means necessary — even if it means blowing up the filibuster. In many ways, the SAVE Act is a solution in search of a problem — voter fraud is rare, non-citizen voting is already illegal, and this bill would make it harder for millions of people to vote for no good reason. Check out the story below, where The Preamble’s executive editor Ashton Lattimore digs deep into the implications of the SAVE Act for married women, and how it plays into a much bigger — and more problematic — conversation that some people are having about marriage.

— Sharon

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The idea that married women’s votes don’t matter is an old one in America. In the decade before women’s right to vote was written into the US Constitution, the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage argued that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote for many reasons, including that they lacked the mental capacity and the time to keep up with politics, and that giving them political equality would upend the norms of family life. For married women, they said, there was simply no need to vote: a pamphlet they distributed urged readers to “Vote NO on Woman Suffrage… because 80% of the women eligible to vote are married and can only double or annul their husbands’ votes.” According to NAOWS, being married negated the need for women to vote — it was little more than a distraction from women’s proper sphere of homemaking.

Of course, NAOWS ultimately lost their fight, and women gained the right to vote in 1920. But while the 19th Amendment seemingly put an end to the notion that women’s political participation is conditional, or negotiable, the current congressional fight over election overhaul legislation suggests that married women’s voting rights still aren’t being taken seriously.

President Trump is pushing Senate Republicans to pass what’s being collectively referred to as the SAVE Act, a package of three bills that would impose strict identification requirements for registering to vote and casting a ballot, sharply restrict mail-in voting, and give the federal government unprecedented access to voters’ information. The House of Representatives has already pushed this legislation through.

Republicans say the SAVE Act is necessary to prevent non-citizens from voting in US elections, which is already illegal and punishable with fines or even jail time. It’s also extremely rare — while President Trump has claimed that tens of thousands undocumented immigrants voted against him in 2020, research has shown that no single state has discovered large numbers of non-citizen voters, and in some states like Utah, no non-citizen appears to have ever voted.

President Trump has called passing the legislation his number one priority, and has urged the Senate to change its filibuster rules — which in practice mean any legislation needs 60 votes to pass — to push the package through. He also says he’ll refuse to sign any other legislation until the SAVE Act is passed. But in their quest to solve what seems to be a non-problem, Republicans are backing laws that erect significant barriers to voting for a huge population of eligible voters on both ends of the political spectrum: married women.

Burdens on a constitutional right

The SAVE Act would require eligible voters to provide proof of US citizenship to be allowed to register to vote. Passports, birth certificates, some military IDs, and several other types of documents would all qualify, but there’s a catch: the proof must show the “full name” of the would-be registrant. Most Americans don’t have a valid passport, nor are the majority members of the military, which means the most readily available form of proof for most people will be their birth certificate. For a whole lot of women, the “full name” on their birth certificate won’t match their current legal name when they try to register to vote.

The SAVE Act says that in the case of a name discrepancy, would-be registrants have to provide “additional documentation” to prove the name on their proof of citizenship is their previous name — that might mean sending away for original copies of their marriage certificate, a divorce decree, or some other document that might explain why their name has been changed, at their own time and expense.

“Obtaining that marriage certificate is an additional cost, administrative burden, and extra penalty that other voters do not have to do,” said Tracy Thomas, a constitutional law professor at the University of Akron. That administrative burden would fall disproportionately on women even if the bill doesn’t explicitly target them, which could potentially bring legal scrutiny.

For people who can’t get the necessary documents, the SAVE Act says they can register with an affidavit affirming that their name has changed, but that would require making an appointment with a notary public or other official qualified to witness the signing of the affidavit, and of course paying a fee for their services.

“These might all seem like trivial costs, but they all add up,” added Thomas. “There are also time delays and administrative inconvenience and burden at each step that creates more obstacles and discouragement to voting.”

There’s also a strong likelihood that what will be acceptable “additional documentation” will vary around the country, since the SAVE Act leaves it to individual states to decide their procedures for handling name discrepancies.

So in effect, the SAVE Act package throws tangible extra barriers and costs — in time, money, and potential confusion — in front of married women (or anyone else who’s changed their name) who are hoping to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to vote.

This isn’t a niche problem: the overwhelming majority of women in opposite-sex marriages change their name in one way or another — 79% take their husband’s name, and the number rises to 84% when you include those who hyphenate. That means roughly 69 million women in the US don’t have a birth certificate that matches their current name, and the SAVE Act would create the conditions under which they can’t register to vote without going through additional and sometimes costly steps that won’t be required of other people. Trans people who’ve undergone name changes would also be impacted. Meanwhile, men would be mostly insulated from the bother, since only 4% change their names upon marriage.

While this potential problem with the election legislation has been widely reported, Republican leadership has essentially handwaved the problem away, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissing it as “fearmongering.”

“As far as married women who have changed their name, if they’re already registered to vote, they’re entirely unaffected by the SAVE Act,” said Leavitt during a press briefing. “For the small fraction of individuals who have changed their name or their address, they can still register to vote, of course, they just have to go through their state processes to update that documentation.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt

Democrats have disagreed. “A real solution would eliminate the provision that requires women to go around and gather all these documents only to then affirm their own identity,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez told The 19th.

With the president urging his party forward on this issue, it’s worth asking why Republicans seemingly have adopted such a cavalier attitude toward barriers to married women’s political participation. Many Republicans likely back the SAVE Act just because of the party’s staunch support for election security measures and voter ID laws, and broad majorities of Americans favor requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID for casting a ballot. But even support for those measures may not fully explain the party’s willingness to burden millions of women’s voting rights just to achieve their vision of election security — because there’s a growing sentiment on the fringes of the party that women’s votes shouldn’t matter at all, and that our right to vote is negotiable again in a way it hasn’t been since the suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Echoes of the anti-suffrage movement

During the suffrage movement, not only did anti-suffragists oppose any women having the right to vote, but some made arguments explicitly claiming that marriage itself made women’s votes irrelevant or problematic. Under the legal concept of “coverture,” which was prevalent in legal systems around the US until the 1920s, the moment a woman married, she ceased to have any legal interests, property rights, or socio-political identity of her own — they were all subsumed within her husband’s identity. Based on that understanding of the world, a married woman had no need for a vote.

The same NAOWS pamphlet that argued married women had no need to vote also combined household tips with its anti-suffrage agitation: “Why vote for pure food laws, when your husband does that, while you can purify your ice-box with saleratus water?” it asked, referencing a baking soda mixture used for cleaning. The pamphlet included plenty of other nudges for women to focus on the household and the health of their families and leave the politics to the men, like these helpful hints: “You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout. A handful of potash and some boiling water is quicker and cheaper… Clean houses and good homes, which cannot be provided by legislation, keep children healthier than any number of uplift laws.”

Pamphlet of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage

In the present day, similar rhetoric is finding a foothold in conservative circles, both in culture and politics. TikTok influencers urge women to reject the harsh worlds of business and politics and embrace their “divine feminine” by devoting themselves to #TradWife life and focusing on house and home.

Meanwhile, Republican officials as highly placed as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth express support for the notion of “household voting” — which sounds straight out of a 19th century pamphlet. Hegseth approvingly shared an interview with Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson in which he argued, “In my ideal society, we would vote as households… And I would ordinarily be the one that would cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”

The 2024 Republican National Convention featured Abby Johnson as a speaker after she tweeted her support for “bringing back household voting,” and wrote that in “a Godly household, the husband would get the final say.” The sentiment has been percolating for a while: after the 2016 election, when women largely voted against Donald Trump, #RepealThe19th trended on Twitter.

While modern anti-suffrage sentiment seems mostly confined to the fringes of the Republican party, it does raise questions when viewed alongside the party establishment’s apparent willingness to burden married women’s voting rights with legislation like the SAVE Act. It’s all part of the same ecosystem.

And all of this rhetoric steering women away from political participation and toward the home is bubbling up around the same time that women in the US are vocally deprioritizing marriage. In a 2023 survey, 48% of women said that “being married was not too or not at all important for a fulfilling life,” and marriage rates are declining among younger generations. Watching the trends with alarm, conservatives have been working on countermeasures: a Heritage Foundation report on “Saving America by Saving the Family” advocates encouraging marriage by offering “boot camps” to teach young couples how to navigate it successfully.

The same report also urges states to end no-fault divorce and also reform alimony statutes, which together would make it more difficult for women to end bad marriages (70% of all divorces are initiated by women), and more likely they’ll leave with no financial support when they do. Combined with conservative support for the SAVE Act, the effect of these policy ideas would be trapping women in marriages and then politically penalizing them for falling into the trap.

The irony is that while imperiling married women’s access to the ballot fits within this larger ideological project, it actually has real potential to hurt Republicans’ electoral prospects. While women as a group tend to lean liberal, married women actually lean Republican by a 5% margin. And married women who change their names — the ones most at risk of being disenfranchised by the SAVE Act — are even more well-represented on the right: 90% of conservative Republican married women say they changed their name when they got married, while only 66% of liberal Democrats say the same.

And white women, who have swung right in recent elections, are even more likely than women of other racial groups to have changed their name upon marriage. So the very women who’ve helped sweep Republicans into the White House and into majorities in Congress are among those most likely to be turned away from the polls if the SAVE Act were to pass the Senate.

Of course, that truth sits within the larger context of a United States where women’s political influence has begun to outpace men’s, at least in terms of sheer numbers. Women register to vote at higher rates than men, and in every election since 1980, women have turned out in higher proportions than men. In presidential elections, the number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every race since 1964. Women’s votes have the power to swing elections, and that includes married women.

We’ve come a long way since the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and the years when anti-suffragists argued that married women didn’t need the vote because their husbands could represent them at the polls. Today, it’s rare for anyone to make the same argument so plainly, but policies like the SAVE Act that put barriers between married women and the ballot box risk reviving the same logic. Understood within that context, the legislation is worthy of serious scrutiny.