Your ‘WTF Is Happening’ Guide to the SAVE Act, a GOP Bill That Could Disenfranchise Millions of Women Voters

After months of stripping the federal government for parts, attacking Medicaid and Social Security, tanking the economy, and throwing the lives of Republican and Democratic voters alike into chaos, President Trump and the GOP are clearly concerned about their rapidly waning electoral popularity. But to address this unpopularity, they aren’t interested in changing their policies or behaviors. Instead, they’re trying to stop as many people as possible from voting—particularly targeting communities of color, rural communities, and, of course, women.

On Thursday, the GOP-controlled House passed the SAVE Act, or the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, a bill to impose sweeping, wholly unnecessary voter registration requirements with the potential to keep millions of people from voting. There are specific communities that the bill disparately harms, but it would inconvenience pretty much everyone by requiring you to register to vote or update your voter registration in person, and present a passport, birth certificate, or other citizenship documents that as many as 21.3 million American citizens—a tenth of the electorate—don’t have readily available.

Here’s what you need to know about the bill that could potentially disenfranchise millions of voters.

Who is supporting this god-awful bill and why?

The bill, introduced by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) passed the House by a 220 to 208 margin on Thursday, with four Democrats—Reps. Jared Golden of Maine, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, Henry Cuellar of Texas, and Ed Case of Hawaii—voting for it. President Trump has vocally endorsed the bill and, in March, while continuing to spread the lie that voter fraud is rampant (it’s not), he signed an executive order requiring the presentation of documents proving citizenship to vote. However, the executive branch doesn’t have sweeping authority over how states carry out elections, so the constitutionality of Trump’s order is shaky at best, which is why the GOP is now pushing the SAVE Act.

“I voted for the SAVE Act for the simple reason that American elections are for Americans. Requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote is common sense,” Golden tweeted shortly after the vote. But non-citizens already can’t vote, and voter fraud from non-citizens is extremely rare. Per the Brennan Center, most reported incidents of voter fraud stem from clerical errors and “bad data matching practices.” The organization identified an average voter fraud incident rate between 0.0003% and 0.0025%. In 2014, the Washington Post found just 31 credible instances of voter impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.

The SAVE Act doesn’t solve a problem, because there is none—it just makes it exponentially harder for citizens. As Molly McGrath, director of the ACLU’s national voting rights campaigns, put it in a statement calling on the Senate to block the SAVE Act, “This isn’t about protecting voters or our elections, it’s about politicians who want to protect themselves and pick and choose their voters. But that’s not how democracy works.”

Which voters are targeted under the SAVE Act?

The SAVE Act would effectively end online and mail voter registration as well as local registration drives. The reality is, if registering to vote and voting become even slightly more difficult, more and more people are simply not going to do either. If voters in rural communities or voters with disabilities are forced to drive hours to the closest government office to register, they probably won’t. If low-income voters are forced to pay $200 for a passport because they don’t have access to their birth certificate, they probably won’t. If people have a harder time voting, the GOP believes they’ll have an easier time staying in power. It’s not complicated.

SAVE Act just passed House. It is modern-day poll tax that would disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, end online, mail + voter registration drives & require voters to register in person at election offices, forcing some rural voters to drive 8 hours to register. Total disaster in every way

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— Ari Berman (@ariberman.bsky.social) April 10, 2025 at 11:36 AM

Could the SAVE Act stop married women from voting?

Possibly. About 69 million American women who changed their last names after getting married may lack the documents needed to prove their identity and name change to register to vote. In a statement shared with Jezebel, the Democratic Women’s Caucus in Congress said the bill’s passage marks “a dark day for women” in the U.S.: “If women can’t register, we can’t vote. 105 years after finally gaining the right to vote, we cannot afford to lose our voice.”

“Trump and Republicans’ SAVE Act is a direct attack on women’s ability to register to vote. Republicans’ requirement to register using a birth certificate or a passport that matches a voter’s current name would make voting harder and more expensive for millions of women,” their statement continues. “This is too expensive and out of reach for millions of working women and moms.” 

While Republicans try to minimize the SAVE Act’s harms because women can present their marriage license along with their citizenship documentation, the fact remains that this is still an added barrier imposed on nearly 70 million voters that men and other voting blocs don’t face.

In September, New Hampshire enacted new voting laws that closely reflect the SAVE Act by requiring physical documentation to prove citizenship—and it’s already disproportionately impacted women. During March’s primary elections, married women voters who changed their last names from the name on their birth certificate reported being forced to make multiple trips to polling places with different documentation. One woman told the Associated Press that it took her three trips before she was finally told her documentation matched up and she could vote.

a barrier that doesn’t exist for others!! that is suppression!!! the more barriers you add, the less likely people are to vote! it’s not about if women can or can’t figure it out, it’s that having to figure something out is suppression!

— emily may (@emilykmay) April 11, 2025

Shortly after the bill passed on Thursday, Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential nominee from a major political party, further called attention to the SAVE Act’s disparate impact on women: “The House just passed the Republican voter suppression measure that threatens voting access for millions of Americans, including 69 million women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates,” she wrote. “Make sure your senators know you expect them to stand against it.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee who took a leading role in House Democrats’ investigation of the events of Jan. 6, also warned that the SAVE Act would specifically target “tens of millions of… mostly women, who change their names after marriage.”

Ugh. How did we get here?

Five years ago, rioters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 because Trump and Republicans lied to their base that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, and that elections in the U.S., broadly, are plagued by rampant fraud and illegal voters. This is obviously not the reality, yet it’s the entire basis for the SAVE Act.

During and after the 2020 election, President Trump also set out to demonize vote by mail and the standard, legally required practice of counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, so long as they were mailed by Election Day. Alarmingly, the SAVE Act would ban this practice, a move that has the potential to disregard millions of votes that will disproportionately come from working people who vote by mail because they don’t have the time, resources, or physical ability to vote in person.

Since Trump’s Big Lie in 2020, Republican-controlled state legislatures have aggressively clamped down on voting rights, pushing complicated voter ID laws or, in states like Georgia and Texas, attempting to restrict volunteers from handing out water to people waiting in long lines to vote. Other Republican-controlled states have aggressively worked to purge as many voters as possible from voter rolls in recent years. Data has shown a link between voter suppression tactics in these states and the passage of unpopular laws like abortion bans.

The SAVE Act now takes all of these state-level threats to democracy to the next level.

So, what happens next?

If it does become law, it would take effect immediately. The GOP claims that if you’re already registered to vote, then you’re all set. But voting rights groups warn that, even if you’re already registered, this would apply if you need to update your registration at all, like if you change your name or move. 

The House passed the SAVE Act for the first time in July. But it stalled in the Senate, and then-President Biden pledged to veto it. Now, the Senate will vote on the SAVE Act again on an unspecified date, and it will require 60 votes to pass—thankfully, that’s a steep requirement for Republicans, who hold only a narrow majority. Here’s hoping.