Claims SAVE Act Stops Married Women Voting Insults Intelligence

Hey there, little lady, here’s another reason not to get married: If the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” (SAVE) Act passes, it will be too hard for married gals to figure out how to vote.   

The ridiculous claim that married women won’t be able to vote was presented as legitimate news in the Feb. 11 Newsweek piece, “Married Women Could Be Stopped From Voting Under SAVE Act.” Their source: the left leaning Center for American Progress, which is actively working against the SAVE Act.

Glamour Magazine is suddenly all worked up about this issue too, publishing a Feb. 12 piece, “The SAVE Act Could Stop Millions of Women From Voting,” with sourcing from the left-leaning Brennan Center For Justice, which is also actively working against the SAVE Act.

Ms. Magazine published “The SAVE Act Is Voter Suppression Disguised as Election Integrity,” on Feb. 11 with sourcing from the Center for American Progress.

USA Today posted a piecce Wednesday titled, “What is SAVE Act? Here’s what it could mean for married women and voting rights,” relying on information from the Brennan Center For Justice and The Center for American Progress.

A host of other pieces promoting the same garbage have been produced in recent days, in both the local and national propaganda press.

It is all designed to make you go, “Whoa, this SAVE Act sounds serious.” But the bill is simply asking for authentic identification from anyone who registers to vote to assure only U.S. citizens vote.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, reintroduced the bill in January, and it took a month for liberal think tanks to come up with messaging and launch a coordinated media blitz against the act.

This is how the media is managed. Media relations people connected to think tanks or nonprofits provide their slanted data and put a story idea on the media’s radar. Then they nag reporters and editors to run the the story. Phone calls, emails, and text messages make the reporter feel important. Media relations people can provide “experts” for interviews, even locally if wanted. That is how we end up seeing similar stories like this, all released at once.

Shame on the lazy press that based reporting on the public relations material it received from leftist think tanks.

“American elections belong to American citizens, and the public’s confidence in those elections is the cornerstone of our republic,” Roy said in a statement about the SAVE Act. “The House passed this critical bipartisan bill last year — I look forward to working with the Republican Senate to put this policy on President Trump’s desk.”

The SAVE Act would require states to get proof of citizenship, in person, before registering an individual to vote for a federal election. Under SAVE, citizens seeking voter registration would provide a REAL ID, U.S. Passport, military identification, birth certificate, or other forms identification proving citizenship.

“While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name,” the Center for American Progress warns.

Looks like they think women are stupid. They are saying women who already figured out how to change their name are not smart enough to provide documentation of that name change.

“When women change their names upon marriage (or divorce) there is a process for changing / updating name from birth certificate or a prior marriage,” Cleta Mitchell, senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, told The Federalist in an email. “Millions of women do it every day so they can operate their lives under their married names.”

This is a repackaging of the racist idea that minorities are not capable of providing identification to vote, as Curtis Hill, former Indiana attorney general, covered in 2022 for The Federalist.  

The Center for American Progress offers another reason it thinks the SAVE Act would be super unfair.

“Documentation would need to be presented in person, the legislation would, in practice, prevent Americans from being able to register to vote by mail; end voter registration drives nationwide; and eliminate online voter registration overnight,” the center’s website reads. “Americans would need to appear in person, with original documentation, to even simply update their voter registration information for a change of address or change in party affiliation. These impacts alone would set voter registration sophistication and technology back by decades and would be unworkable for millions of Americans.”

These are the methods that can be used to cheat. For example, as I previously reported for The Federalist that, in Pennsylvania, the Department of State gave guidance to counties that if someone requests a ballot by mail and their Social Security or driver’s license number is missing or does not match their name, send them a ballot anyway. It is a process ripe for voter fraud, easily prevented by making wannabe voters register in person.

 Women in the suffrage movement marched in the streets and worked for years for the right to vote. Soldiers have died to cement that right. Yet today we can’t ask voters to lift a finger to cast a vote?  

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.