This Floridian communication came in close to midnight at the start of the weekend. Stepford Wives? Handmaids’ Tales?
Happy lives? Not if the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act) returns for vote like a bad penny, having failed to pass once, so far. You might have heard what this Republican-demanded Act is all about: it attempts to add further measures to prevent illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Except: we already have legislation for that.
The wording of the SAVE act slickly allows to question voter registrations of an entirely different constituency: married women. If a married woman with a name change wants to vote, she will need to show either a passport or other proof of citizenship with her name on it, or must produce both a birth certificate (with the seal of the state where it was issued; no copies allowed) and a current form of identification—both with the exact same name on them.
That could instantly disqualify about 90 percent of all married women without passports or other proof that matches their birth certificates or proof of a legal name change.
Here is a report by the National Organization for Women on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name.
That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents. And since this is a proposed federal law, states cannot protect against a Presidential effort to purge the voter rolls from women.(Ref.)
According to the Center for American Women and Politics, Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, with the turnout gap between women and men growing slightly larger with each successive presidential election. They also tend to lean more liberal than their male cohort. And that was before their right to bodily autonomy and healthcare decisions was taken away by radical Republicans.
Some extremist voices even question the 19th Amendment, having given women the right to vote some 100 years ago, but our participation can obviously be curtailed by administrative, political tricks rather than a change to the Constitution.
What will come next?
Music about women marching. Not backwards, either.
