The SAVE Act

Enough with Gaslighting Women

With so much ink spilled about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—the Republican-sponsored bill that passed the House last week and is now on to the Senate—Contrarian readers have requested a deep dive about one aspect that has gone viral: how it would affect women.

I checked in with Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), to get the details on the SAVE Act and why it is presented as such bad news for democracy. This led to the insight that it is a galling example of what it looks like to gaslight women.

Among the SAVE Act’s provisions is a stringent requirement for anyone registering to vote or updating their registration—in other words, those who would have to appear in person at an election office with documented proof of citizenship, e.g. a birth certificate, U.S. passport, naturalization paperwork, or particular versions of a Real ID. State-issued drivers’ licenses would no longer be adequate without one of the above documents (nor would other forms of state ID, military IDs, and tribal identification).

The birth certificate option poses a particular challenge for married women—who are the most likely to have undertaken a name change. This includes multi-hyphenates (like mine), dual last names like Fatima’s, and the 69 million others in this country who have changed or altered their last names to align with their spouses. Turns out that, as a nation, we are rather retro when it comes to this ritual (nearly 80 percent of women who are married to men have changed their names).

Having different names on birth certificates is also an issue for many trans people, as many as 3.3 million of whom are eligible voters.

The option to sub out a birth certificate for a passport is of small consolation, given how expensive and inconvenient passports are to acquire—which is perhaps why more than half of U.S. citizens (upwards of 140 million people) currently do not have one.

All told, experts at the Brennan Center tallied that the SAVE Act could disenfranchise 21.3 million eligible voters, or more than 9 percent of American citizens.

According to the NWLC, it comes as no surprise that the SAVE Act’s identification requirements stand to disproportionately harm those who already face disenfranchisement: women (particularly women of color), trans people who already face higher poverty rates, and those with lower incomes or less education—who are less likely to have a valid passport or the means to obtain one.

It is hardly a shock House Republicans are doubling down on Trump’s election fraud trope and backing his incessant lies about hordes of noncitizens casting ballots. (Nor is it the first time the House has introduced and passed the SAVE Act.)

In the words of SAVE Act sponsor, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), all of the above arguments amount to “absurd armchair speculation,” or what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called “fearmongering” and a “fallacy.”

The attempt to gaslight women about our precious voting rights strikes Goss Graves (and me) as especially outrageous. It provokes a different kind of nausea to stomach claims that a read-the-words-in-black-and-white, problematic-to-millions provision has all been conjured in our little heads.

Republicans have countered that there are alternatives to remedy proof of citizenship discrepancies, and those are left to individual states. Can you blame women’s skepticism of the supposed cure? With a decade of recent data showing the lengths to which some states will go to squelch votes—either intentionally (closing polling sites) or inadvertently (shuttering DMV offices where IDs are obtained)?

We are seeing SAVE Act-style ID provisions falter in practice. Last month in New Hampshire, which has a new state law with similar requirements, several married women have reported challenges at local polls due to a lack of a matching birth certificate. Said one voter who came armed with supporting collateral—including “everything but my blood type and the kitchen sink”—the process is not merely protracted, it is “profoundly sexist and limiting.”

This inclination to gaslight is surely borne out of fear of what happens when women, especially women of color, do indeed vote. The numbers are telling: women register and cast ballots at higher rates than men; Black women show up at the polls and support voter mobilization efforts in even greater numbers.

Goss Graves further notes that when basic liberties are directly at stake, such as ballot measures, and policy outcomes feel directly tied to one’s vote, the impulse to gaslight is more pernicious. Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, for example, even as turnout for reproductive rights was massive, split-ticket voters supported Trump because he campaigned on abortion as a state issue. Of course he was going to pull federal levers to undermine access, cut family planning, and pardon clinic protestors. After all, it was right there in Project 2025! Those lies landed hard.

So too have Trump’s claims to be a defender of women (the title of his Day Two executive order)… “whether we like it or not,” all while decimating policies like health research and education, tanking the economy, and being an alleged sexual predator himself.

All of which is to say the SAVE Act’s strategy to go after the vote—while trying to convince women we are nuts when we make any noise about how it shuts us out—is an infuriating, dishonest game. We will not let them win. We know how profoundly women’s votes matter. They know it, too. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to silence us.