Could the SAVE America Act Prevent Women From Registering to Vote?
The Fight For Political Power & Autonomy
Women have outvoted men in every U.S. presidential election for the past 46 years. That’s not a coincidence — that’s thanks to a centuries-long fight led by fearless women who demanded control over their lives and communities. But before women in the United States were granted the right to vote in 1920, and for quite some time after, women didn’t even legally have control over their own identity due to a common-law doctrine called coverture.
Coverture dictated that no female person had a legal identity. When a woman married, she became a “feme covert,” a covered woman who didn’t legally exist. Because of this, married women took their husbands’ last name and couldn’t own property, sign contracts, sue, or have any financial independence. During this time period, married women also didn’t have rights to their own children or bodies.
When women finally won the right to vote with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, Black and Brown women faced continued disenfranchisement due to poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and other deliberately discriminatory voting practices that weren’t outlawed until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nine years later, when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974, women could apply for credit cards or loans for the first time without needing their husband’s signature. Around the same time, states began passing laws to make it easier for women to hyphenate or keep their last name after marriage.
But now, the choice a woman has to change their last name could cost her the right to vote.
Could the SAVE America Act Prevent Married Women From Registering to Vote?
For the first time in history, U.S. lawmakers are pushing a national voting bill that would dismantle generations of voting rights progress. A new bill called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act, would make it significantly harder for millions of U.S. citizens to register and vote — especially in communities that already face steep barriers to the ballot box. Under the SAVE America Act, all Americans would be required to show a document to prove their U.S. citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, just to register or update their voter registration.
Our research shows that over 21 million eligible voters — nearly one in 10 voting-age citizens — don’t have easy access to documents proving their U.S. citizenship. In fact, 150 million U.S. citizens don’t even have a passport, and 13% of American citizens can’t easily access their birth certificate. We’ve already seen what a proof-of-citizenship law like this can do. In Kansas, 31,000 eligible U.S. citizens were prevented from registering simply because they could not access the documents they needed.
And it’s not just about registration. The SAVE America Act would also require a photo ID every time you vote, in person and by mail. Common forms of ID that are currently acceptable for voting in many states, like student and employee IDs, would not be accepted.
States would also be required to submit their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security for monthly citizenship verification checks against flawed databases, meaning lawfully registered U.S. citizens could be mistakenly flagged as ineligible and kicked off their state’s voter rolls.
SAVE America Act supporters continue to push for these anti-democratic restrictions, claiming it’s a “common sense” measure to secure U.S. elections.
But there is no common sense to this argument at all.
Utah, for example, audited over two million voter registrations between April 2025 and January 2026 and only found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero votes cast by noncitizens.
The truth is, federal law already prohibits noncitizen voting, and violating state and federal election laws carries severe criminal penalties, deportation, and potential jail time. We know these existing laws work because study after study shows noncitizen registration and voting are extremely rare.
Rather than protecting our democracy as the SAVE America Act claims it would, eligible voters could be blocked from the ballot box. Communities that are least likely to have acceptable ID documents will be hit the hardest — including 60 million women who changed their name after marriage.
Do that many women actually change their names?
Yes. An estimated eight out of 10 women change their last name when they get married or divorced. Because the name on your birth certificate does not get changed when you legally change your name, that same group of women will not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.
Which means 80% of married women could experience challenges registering to vote or updating their registration under the SAVE America Act.
The bill does include a provision that would allow states to accept “other evidence” of citizenship if a voter doesn’t have one of the accepted documents, or if there are discrepancies in their documents due to a name change. However, even with this provision, married women could still face difficulties registering to vote because the bill doesn’t specify what documents would be accepted — it would be up to individual states to decide.
“Exactly what would be accepted or how this would be administered is not laid out in the bill,” VoteRiders Legal Director Ceridwen Cherry explained to FactCheck.org.
“This ambiguity in the bill’s text presents the distinct possibility that individuals who do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name, such as married women who changed their names, would not be offered the opportunity to provide supplementary documentation like a marriage certificate as part of the voter registration process.”
Beyond the Statistics: A True Story of Impact
You’ve read the statistics and the historical data, but also keep in mind: there are real people behind those numbers. Real Americans could potentially be blocked from the ballot box under the SAVE America Act. People like Linda.
Linda is one of many voters VoteRiders has helped secure ID documents after extreme difficulty. She is also one of millions of women who changed their name after marriage and, until working with VoteRiders, no longer had an ID that matched her current legal name.
Linda couldn’t get a state ID until she submitted multiple marriage licenses and divorce decrees — one dating back to fifty years. Like so many other Americans who change their name after marriage, Linda found herself taking on the role of a detective, stuck in a confusing maze of bureaucracy and paperwork as she tried to track down a paper trail of documents to prove her current last name.
Without a photo ID, Linda was unable to vote in her home state of Indiana. She is also low-income and disabled, so getting to the various ID issuing offices to track down her documents and pay for them wasn’t an option. If she hadn’t found out about VoteRiders’ free ID services, she doesn’t know if she would have ever been able to vote in Indiana again.
“If you’re a woman, you need to pay attention because you may not know that you can’t vote,” Linda warned in a conversation with VoteRiders. “Voting is very important — it’s your civic duty.”
So, What Can You Do Right Now to Stop The SAVE America Act?
Throughout history, women have fought tirelessly to have an independent legal and political identity. Now, the SAVE America Act would essentially penalize women for exercising a personal choice about their own identity.
Thanks to Americans across the country who sent millions of calls and emails demanding that their Senators protect their freedom to vote, the U.S. Senate has so far failed to pass the SAVE America Act and, as of late March, is on a two-week recess.
But our fight is not over just yet. It’s up to all of us to keep the pressure on. Here’s what you can do:
- Share this blog post with your community.
- Use our action to tell your Senator to vote NO on the SAVE America Act when they return from recess in April. Then, share it with your friends and family so they can make their voices heard, too.
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