GOP Plan: Deny MILLIONS of Women the Right to Vote

They see the election results, and they know women are a threat to their majority.

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Read below to learn how the GOP’s SAVE Act - currently being considered in the US House - aims to disenfranchise MILLIONS of American women.

DemCast is leading a Twitter storm & digital rally at 1:00pm ET TODAY to put pressure on vulnerable House Reps and Senators ahead of their votes on the bill. (The focus is Twitter because that’s still where Congress and media congregate, but definitely share to all platforms.)

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What is happening?

“Extensive research reveals that fraud is very rare. Yet repeated, false allegations of fraud can make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to participate in elections.”

—Brennan Center for Justice

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week - as early as Tuesday -on the bogusly named SAVE Act. The so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act would make it really, really hard to register to vote, especially for women. It would require:

• All Americans to present specific documents - like a valid passport, a certified birth certificate, or naturalization papers - to register to vote.

• Current voters to re-register every time they move residence.

• All eligible voters to visit an election in person to register.

Why are women so outraged? Because part of the act states that the name on your registration must match the name on your documents. Married women are the voters most likely to change their names.

The SAVE Act only makes sense if your goal is to take away the rights of women.

Why is this happening?

Republicans have been crying for years about voter fraud. In reality, noncitizen voting fraud is what the Brennan Center calls “vanishingly rare.” If that seems like a precise adverb, its is. The number of suspected fraudulent votes have actually been dropping: When the Brennan Center conducted a national survey, it found a whopping 30 out of 23.5 million suspicious incidents. That’s .0001 percent of the total votes.

Of course, the MAGA regime doesn’t care about evidence or anything as inconsequential. Trump and his disciples have grabbed hold of this issue and are running all the way to Congress with it.

The real goal is plain to anyone who reads a bit deeper.

The SAVE Act is not about election security; it is about restricting access to the ballot to maintain political power.

-Stella Adams, Ms.

Why did Trump and the Republicans do this?

The Republicans are salivating to return the country and the vote back to the 1800s, when only rich white men could vote.

There are so many layers of voter suppression built into the SAVE Act that you could call it the foundational structure.

• Voter Suppression Challenge #1: You have to schlepp to whatever agency oversees your state’s voting with your documents. This means no more voter drives or online or mail-in registration. It also presents a real-world challenge. More than 60 million rural voters will have to drive an average of 260 miles simply to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Meanwhile, urban voters, who often don’t own cars, will be forced to commute upward of two hours on public transportation.

• Voter Suppression Challenge #2: You need to possess what the Republicans deem a valid form of ID. Sure, the letter of the act lists five legitimate forms of identification but most forms of government-issued identification don’t list your birthplace. Scratch your REAL ID as a form of identification, or your military ID, or your tribal ID. You also can’t use your birth certificate unless it is certified with an embossed governmental seal. (This analysis from the Democratic Party explains just how ridiculous their requirements really are.) A passport is one of the few forms of government ID that specifies where a person was born but…

• Voter Suppression Challenge #3 for the win: If you are using your birth certificate, the name must match your current name. But a recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 84% of women - as many as 69 million - have changed their last name so it no longer matches their birth certificate. Salon writes:

“This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband's last name and doesn't have a passport…”

Because the bill is really an effort to take away women’s rights to vote, we think it deserves its own subhead. Read on!

The Bottom Line

Why do they hate us so much? Alas, there is no answer. Trump has shown that he has little or no respect for women. He even buried his first wife on his golf course in order to save on taxes. Trump and his Republican cronies long to return to the days when women were subservient to men. Writes Amanda Marcotte in Salon:

“Trump has long argued that ‘fortunately’ men of a certain class have enjoyed the right to commit violence against women. But it's a privilege Trump reserves only for his friends.”

Ironically, there are women who agree with this premise. Prominent anti-abortion activist Abby Johnson, who spoke at the RNC, is one of them. She apparently doesn’t know Serena Joy’s punishment for committing the grievous crime of reading.

In fact, it seems like many in Trump’s circle are taking their cues from Gilead and Christian nationalism. Men like JD Vance and Pete Hegseth flirt with the idea of repealing the 19th Amendment entirely and switching to a “household vote” system in which, obviously, men cast the sole vote as the head of the household.

There is no silver lining to life in a Gilead spinoff, but we could point out that blue state residents have way more passports than red states… So while Republican men may be cool with their wives not voting, we women who never changed our names will be voting in numbers too big to ignore.

What can you do?

This is the week to get loud! Talk to your family, friends, neighbors, and social media circles about the Republican plan to take American women back to the 19th century.

• Demand that House representatives vote against the SAVE Act! The Center for American Progress has made it a cinch to contact your representative. Just click here! https://www.americanprogress.org/take-action/tell-congress-to-protect-your-vote-and-block-the-save-act/.

• Get informed. Here are a few articles that will arm you with facts as well as give you nightmares.

  • Brennan Center for Justice, “Noncitizen Voting is Vanishingly Rare”

  • Center for American Progress, “The SAVE Act Would Disenfranchise Millions of Citizens”

  • Salon, "‘A woman is like a child’: MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power”

  • Ms.,“Christian Nationalism’s First Item on the Agenda: Repeal Women’s Right to Vote”

• Support organizations and politicians that will protect women’s voting rights.

• Follow Marc Elias & Democracy Docket on social media. They have promised legal action if the SAVE Act passes.