SAVEd from Voting (Written by Oakley R. Robins, Apr 23, 2025)

On April 10, the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, sending fear into tens of millions of women, transgender people, rural voters, elderly voters and naturalized citizens that their votes may become far more difficult to cast.

The act, introduced by Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas), has been heralded by proponents as a bill intended to prevent noncitizen voting, something already made unlawful in 1996 and noted as exceedingly rare with only a handful of cases over the years, typically caused by simple filing errors. What has millions of U.S. citizens worried about being disenfranchised are provisions requiring voter registration to occur in-person with an agent, as well as requiring proof of citizenship that matches one’s identification documents. Consequently, the bill has left various blocks of the U.S. population grasping for their right to vote. The piece of legislation passed the House by a 220-208 vote, with all Republicans voting for and with all but four House Democrats voting against.

An estimated 69 million American women and an additional four million American men don’t possess a birth certificate matching their current legal name. For the vast majority, the reason results from a name change due to marriage. It’s widely understood that this bill as a whole would disproportionately affect women as a consequence and for many who feel like the fight for women’s votes is somehow back on, the partisan nature of the act is clear. The part that’s leaving Republican strategists scratching their heads is that it’s conservative women who are statistically more likely to take their spouse’s name. According to polling conducted by the Pew Research Center, 86% of women who identified as conservative-leaning took their spouse’s name, as opposed to only 70% of liberal-oriented women.

Additionally, it may be a fact that not every American is comfortable with, but transgender people do exist. In fact, according to polling from Gallup and the Williams Institute of UCLA, 1.3% of U.S. adults are transgender with an additional 1.6% identifying as nonbinary, adding up to around 2.9% of the adult population or in other words, over seven million people. For a large percentage, getting an accurate birth certificate requires jumping through endless hoops and thanks to recent legislation, sometimes impossible hoops. For many, primarily those from the large Republican stronghold of Florida (this writer included), it is disallowed by law. For many facing this extreme disenfranchisement, the message remains clearer than ever: The rollback of civil liberties will not stop at transgender people.

The bill also goes on to require that all voter registration or updates to one’s registration must be made in person with an agent, a requirement that cuts little fraud while adding significant barriers to voting for rural Americans as well as the millions of Americans left homebound due to age, disability and more. Additionally, around 20 million citizens of voting age, for one reason or another, don’t have readily available access to citizenship-proving documents and so this creates another hurdle for people simply facing situational difficulties. What’s again not understood is what electoral or strategic advantage this would provide the bill’s proponents, since elderly voters tend to lean heavily Republican.

In all of the discussion over the SAVE Act, it’s important not to lose sight of the stated reason for the bill’s existence. In this case, the ostensible intent of the bill is to prevent noncitizen voting, but noncitizen voting was already marked as illegal as part of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility (IIRAIR) Act and is also statistically incredibly rare. For example, in Ohio, the attorney general recently found a total of six cases of successful noncitizen voting and in Georgia a recent voter roll audit found only nine cases of noncitizen voting. The extreme scarcity of cases combined with the in-person registration requirements signal to naturalized citizens that there’s going to be resistance to their presence at the ballot box.

All in all, the SAVE Act tries to address a nearly nonexistent problem with a solution that effectively disenfranchises many and unduly inconveniences millions. The bill’s proponents see no problem with these consequences, going so far as to vote down multiple proposed amendments that would have ensured continued voting rights and access for already eligible women and minority voters, in what reads like a callous and cynical political play, one that may ultimately backfire.

So, what can you do to make your voice heard on this issue? Now that the bill has reached the Senate and with no scheduled action at the time of this article’s writing, this is the perfect window of time to call our senators and make sure they stand up for the rights of all voters.