How the Republican War on Women Extends to Voting Rights

Republicans don’t want women to vote. They now think they may have a strategy that could prevent them from doing so. House Speaker Mike Johnson and former President Donald Trump were pushing the Safeguard American Eligibility, or SAVE, Act, demanding it be part of must-pass legislation to fund the federal government for another year (the funding runs out at the end of this month, and then the shutdown begins).

It died in the House Wednesday night, but, like a bad penny, you can bet it’ll return.*

Trump, on his failing social media site, ranted Tuesday that Republicans must get “every ounce” of the SAVE Act passed or shut down the government “in any way, shape, or form.” He said it was necessary because Democrats are “registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak,” adding the vicious lie that “they will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

Trump, Johnson, and J.D. Vance claim that the SAVE Act is necessary to prevent people who aren’t citizens from voting, but they are entirely unable to prove that any meaningful number of noncitizens have ever illegally voted in any American election. After all, it’s a felony for a noncitizen to vote, and few are stupid enough to take that sort of a chance.

Republicans love to point out that occasionally noncitizens end up on the voting rolls of various states. Oregon, for example, just found that 306 noncitizens were on the voting rolls because they were incorrectly added when they renewed their drivers’ licenses; two had voted because they were mailed ballots and didn’t know better. The state has fixed this error.

But Republicans have absolutely no evidence of any election, anywhere in America, at any time in our history that was ever changed by noncitizens voting. Or of any conspiracy to encourage noncitizens to vote.

In other words, their entire argument is bullshit.

I’m generally reluctant to use profanity in my writing, but this argument deserves a strong word. Descriptors like dissimulation, deceptivity, blagging, dupery, prevarication, jiggery-pokery, supercherie, counterfeisance, misdescription, suggestio falsi, humbuggery, dissemblance, flimflammery, calumny, meretriciousness, or even the good old-fashioned word lie just won’t do: This is bullshit.

As NBC News noted: “The Brennan Center found just 30 suspected noncitizen votes amid 23.5 million votes in 2016, suggesting that suspected noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001% of votes cast. Trump’s own election integrity commission disbanded without releasing evidence of voter fraud, even though he’d claimed 3 million undocumented immigrants had voted in 2016 costing him the popular vote.”

Not only will illegal voting get you years in prison, but it’s one of the most easily discovered crimes. Sean Morales-Doyle, a lawyer for the Brennan Center, laid it out: “This is a crime where not only are the consequences really high and the payoff really low—you’re not getting millions of dollars, it’s not robbing a bank, you [just] get to cast one ballot. But what also makes this somewhat unique is that committing this crime actually entails the creation of a government record of your crime.”

So why is this the hill Republicans are willing to die on? Why would Johnson, Trump, and Vance (and so many other Republicans) put so much effort into a lie that will, if acted on, create chaos for American voters?

And why try so hard to force it into a must-pass bill when it has already passed the House of Representatives on a stand-alone vote? The question contains the seed of its own answer.

The SAVE Act is a proposed federal law, so, first off, it would put a future president (say, Trump) in charge of enforcing it, taking that power away from the states. Millions of voter registrations in any states the president decides are problematic could be removed until those voters “cure” their registrations, and state authorities would have no say in it.

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).

As a result, as the National Organization for Women details in a report on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women:

Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on 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.

Just by coincidence, Republicans will suggest, at this moment in history millions of American women are seriously pissed off at the GOP.

And, Republicans will tell you, that has absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump and Mike Johnson threatening to shut down the government if Democrats don’t go along with these draconian new requirements for women to vote.

I’ll say it again: This effort by Republicans to blackmail Democrats into disenfranchising millions of women just in time for a critical election—just like their claim that legal Haitian immigrants are eating white people’s pets—is complete, utter, unmitigated bullshit.

And the press should do a much better job of calling it exactly what it is.

* A previous version of this article mischaracterized the SAVE Act that was co-sponsored by Senator Joe Manchin. That bill has nothing to do with voting.