A Stupid Republican Trick That Failed
Which is a good thing for women voters
Oh, this was damn sneaky!
The Republican-sponsored Senate bill, S.4292, aka the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or the SAVE Act, was “theoretically” supposed to keep noncitizens from voting in federal elections, like the one we have coming up on Nov. 5.
Instead, it was designed to keep millions of married American women from voting if they did not keep their birth surname or did not have fully documented proof of identity that went from birth name to their current name. Let me quote The New Republic’s article on this:
And what will the law require citizens who want to vote do? Lacking a passport or other proof of citizenship with their married names, they 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.
For women in that situation, they can still register to vote if they can prove that they went to court to change their name when they got married, but most women just start using their new married name without ever going through all those formalities (although a few states recognize marriage as a legal name change).
The bill died last Wednesday in committee — it had been quietly attached to the Republican version of the budget, which failed to pass last Wednesday, so it and others were stripped off the revised bill for the later vote (which passed.). It will not become law, no matter how much Trump lies about Democrats registering illegal aliens as voters. And there are adequate laws in place that make illegal voting a felony; very few people want to risk heavy jail time for a vote.
This bill was an attempt by the misogyny branch of the Republican Dirty Tricks Department to get Trump into the presidency by suddenly and legally remove the vote from millions of women, since it has become clear even to those blinded by admiration of the former president that women overall are far less fond of him than men are.
Think about the 90% of women who take their husband’s surname when they marry — your grandmothers, aunts, mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, friends — so many of whom would have been prevented from voting by this idiot bill.
If that bill had passed last Wednesday, 48 days before the presidential election, the best that could have been hoped for would have been that county clerks’ offices across be overrun with women picking up official birth certificates — but there is no way that the country’s court dockets could be stretched to include all the women who would have needed an official before-a-judge hearing to get a piece of paper verifying their married surname. How many women whose names have changed by marriage still live within easy reach of the place where they were born, married and (in rare cases) had a court-certified legal name change, so that they might be able to go and get the needed documentation and return to the polling place on the same day? Vanishingly few, I think.
And that’s only if these women had followed the vote on the federal budget and noticed the bills bundled in with it; most people in this country don’t follow it that closely. We’re just glad if a bill passes that will continue to fund the government; we tend not to read the details.
It’s more likely that millions of married women who changed their last names without a court appearance would have gone to vote, and been told they were ineligible to vote because they lacked adequate identification that proved they were citizens. They’d been voting all their adult lives, and now they would have been prevented from it by a new law they hadn’t known existed?
I can so easily imagine this happening across the country:
“But Eleanor, I have lived here for 20 years and you’ve been election clerk every time I’ve voted. You know where I live. You know *me*; our kids went to school together. We were in PTA together.”
“I know, Jeannie, but this new law came through, and I am sworn to obey the law. Please stand back from the table.”
I am endlessly grateful that bill died in committee — but I would not put it past Republicans to try something similar again, for another election. Anyone who tries to take away your vote is NOT YOUR FRIEND.
Dirty tricks department, indeed. Scoundrels abounding. Keep your eyes open and read the fine print.