The SAVE Act passed the House on Feb. 11, 2026 by a vote of 218-213 and is now in the Senate awaiting a vote. Voting is expected to take place next week, according to Thune. If and when it passes the Senate, it will go to the president for a final signature.
Will SAVE Act Prevent Married Women from Registering to Vote?
Posted on February 28, 2025
Q: Is it true that under the SAVE Act married women will not be able to register to vote if their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate?
A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted.
Seems to me that if your birth name and married name match, this will disproportionately favor people who marry their siblings or other relatives. I wonder what political leaning that particular segment has 🤔
while i get the joke, i just want to make sure it’s clear to anyone coming across this understnds that women who elect to change their name in the merital tradition of erasure are more likely to be conservative, and the women who have the documents to prove their identity (like a passport) are more likely to be progressive.
all that said, the focus on how this will impact women, specifically, is frustrating because it’s ignoring the biggest groups of people who will be impacted: immigrants and working poor people. we shouldn’t tolerate the disenfranchisement of ~30% of women, so we are clear, but we are positioned to disenfranchise ~80% of immigrants and working poor and no one is talking about it. these are people who are less likely to have ANY of the acceptable documents proposed in the SAVE act.
for context, people experiencing poverty are far less likely to be born in a hospital and have a birth certificate, usually depending on a baptism certificate to establish their government name. meanwhile, immigrants may have a passport, but if it’s expired that’s unacceptable, and a lot of the nations around the world that issued the birth certificates being required by this law in place of a passport can no longer certify birth certificates simply because they aren’t existing anymore. i have multiple friends who can’t get their birth certificates right now because that would put them at risk of government retribution because they are asylum seekers. for example, my siberian neighbor isn’t going to be getting in touch with the Russian government any time soon.
so in conclusion. the aim is to disenfranchise women and minorities. the majority of the women disenfranchised will be conservative. however, the majority of people disenfranchised will be progressive.
and that’s no accident.
For example my teen just needed his birth certificate for a new job and we somehow misplaced it. Getting an expedited replacement took almost two weeks and cost $80.
Even allowing for hospital birth and existing records, misplacing documents is all too easy and could easily become an obstacle to voting. If I’m struggling to make ends meet, no way in hell am I willing to pay $80 to vote and I wouldn’t have thought of it two weeks ahead of time
yup. didn’t even want to get into duplicate records. but yeah, that’s another way this quietly targets working poor people. it disgusts me that 85% of this country supports racist voter ID laws, and that the republicans are using that to fabricate a mandate for even more draconian measures
Or it will disqualify a lot of married women who took their partner’s name
Unmarried women and women who keep their last name will have less trouble voting… and people whose names differ and are aware of the change, are more likely to go through the bullshit to make sure they’re registered. Maybe it’ll prevent a bunch of Magats from being able to vote
It’s utterly disgusting either way. Hope it backfires, they lose, and they’re persecuted. A kid can dream
The logic in my joke is severely flawed, and intentionally so; contrary to popular belief, it’s actually quite difficult to marry a close blood relative, even south of the Mason-Dixon line, which is why most conservatives prefer cohabitation.