Q: Is it true that under the SAVE Act married women will not be able to register to vote if their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate?
A: The proposed SAVE Act instructs states to establish a process for people whose legal name doesn’t match their birth certificate to provide additional documents. But voting rights advocates say that married women and others who have changed their names may face difficulty when registering because of the ambiguity in the bill over what documents may be accepted.
FULL ANSWER
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
On Jan. 3, Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas reintroduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a bill aimed at preventing voting by noncitizens. The SAVE Act would require that individuals registering to vote show “documentary proof of United States citizenship,” including when they re-register after moving to a new state.
In recent weeks, many readers have asked us about the impact of the legislation, particularly whether women who changed their last names when they married would be able to register to vote, a concern that has been highlighted in social media posts.
According to the bill, valid forms of documentary proof include a U.S. passport; a REAL ID-compliant ID that indicates U.S. citizenship, such as an enhanced driver’s license, which is available in a few states; a government-issued photo ID showing the U.S. as the applicant’s birthplace, such as a passport card; and a U.S. military ID if shown alongside a military record of service showing the U.S. as the applicant’s birthplace.
Applicants may also present other government-issued photo IDs if they are shown alongside a certified birth certificate, a record of birth from a U.S. hospital, adoption records, a consular birth report, a naturalization certificate or an American Indian card with the classification “KIC,” designating U.S. citizenship for Mexican-born members of the Kickapoo tribes of Texas and Oklahoma.
The SAVE Act previously passed the House of Representatives in July but died while awaiting action in the Senate. To become law, the bill must pass the House again and the Senate, where it is expected to be blocked by filibuster. The bill would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and Republicans hold 53 Senate seats.
A Jan. 7 press release from Roy’s office announcing the reintroduction of the bill said, “Millions of illegal aliens remain in our country illegally and many have been given the opportunity to register to vote in federal elections. The SAVE Act would thwart Democrat efforts to cement one-party rule by upholding and strengthening current law that permits only U.S. citizens to vote in Federal elections.”
As we’ve written, experts say voter fraud by noncitizens is rare. Under the current law, anyone registering to vote must attest that they are a citizen under penalty of perjury, and noncitizens who vote risk deportation and being permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S.
Meanwhile, voting rights advocate groups say the SAVE Act may prevent U.S. citizens from registering to vote by raising unnecessary barriers. A 2023 survey conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, and other groups found that over 9% of voting-age American citizens do not have easy access to documents that prove their citizenship, including a passport, birth certificate or naturalization certificate.
That percentage was slightly higher — 11% — for Americans who did not identify as white. The survey defined easy access as being able to “quickly find” such documents if people “had to show it tomorrow.”
The Brennan Center has also warned that people who have changed their name, such as married women, may be blocked from registering to vote because of discrepancies between their ID and birth certificate.
In a 2017 analysis of the effects of requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, the Brennan Center reported that in 2005 more than 10,000 people were prevented from registering in Maricopa County, the most populous county in Arizona, after Arizona passed a ballot measure requiring that a passport, birth certificate or naturalization papers be shown upon registering to vote. The law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013 for conflicting with federal law.
According to a Maricopa County official, most of those prevented from registering were “probably U.S. citizens whose married names differ from their birth certificates or who have lost documentation.”
States Can Accept Other Documentation
Roy called the idea that married women would be prevented from registering to vote “absurd armchair speculation.”
In a statement emailed to us on Feb. 20, Roy said, “The legislation provides a myriad [of] ways for people to prove citizenship and explicitly directs States to establish a process for individuals to register to vote if there are discrepancies in their proof of citizenship documents due to something like a name change.”
Roy is referencing a section of the bill that orders states to allow applicants to provide “additional documentation” in the event of a discrepancy.
Roy noted that the bill says: “each State shall establish a process under which an applicant can provide such additional documentation to the appropriate election official of the State as may be necessary to establish that the applicant is a citizen of the United States in the event of a discrepancy with respect to the applicant’s documentary proof of United States citizenship.”
Ambiguity Over What Would Be Accepted
Ceridwen Cherry, legal director at VoteRiders, an organization that provides voter ID education, told us that even with the provision cited by Roy, married women may have difficulty registering to vote because the bill does not specify what documents would be accepted.
The bill “would indeed create barriers to voter registration for many married women. An estimated 69 million women have changed their name at marriage. For these women, their current legal name would not match the name on their birth certificate. As a result, should the SAVE Act be implemented, these voters could not use their birth certificate to prove US citizenship in order to register or update their registration. They would instead have to rely on other forms of proof of citizenship like a passport — a document that almost 150 million Americans do not have,” Cherry told us in an email.
“The SAVE Act does contain a provision that would allow states to accept ‘other evidence’ of citizenship if a voter does not have one of the accepted documents. However, exactly what would be accepted or how this would be administered is not laid out in the bill. This ambiguity in the bill’s text presents the distinct possibility that individuals who do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name, such as married women who changed their names, would not be offered the opportunity to provide supplementary documentation like a marriage certificate as part of the voter registration process,” Cherry said.
“In addition to married women,” Cherry said, “any eligible voter who has changed their names for myriad other reasons (related to marriage or divorce, a gender identity transition, a change based on personal preference, etc.) could face heightened barriers to vote if the SAVE Act were enacted due to their lack of birth certificate that reflects their current legal name.”
Wendy Weiser, vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center, told us in an email that the provision cited by Roy was “a weak one” and “does not provide a meaningful failsafe for married women.”
Weiser said, “Any state process would be severely undercut by another provision in the bill making it a federal crime for election officials to register anyone who does not present ‘documentary proof of citizenship.’ How many election officials would be willing to risk incarceration and steep fines to register someone whose documentation does not match their current name?”
In addition, Weiser said, the bill “would eviscerate many of the most popular methods of voter registration — including registration by mail, online registration, voter registration drives, and automatic registration — by requiring people to show up in person with their citizenship papers.”
Justin Levitt, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, told us in an email that the SAVE Act would make registering to vote harder — but not impossible — for people who have recently changed their names.
“I think part of the worry is that the more documents you require somebody to show up with in person… the harder registration becomes — without any good reason for the extra difficulty,” said Levitt, who briefly served as White House senior policy advisor on voting rights during the Biden administration.
“[A]nother part of the worry is that some officials might well be reasonable but some might well not — or might use their discretion to be less reasonable for some of the people seeking to register,” Levitt also said in the email. “We’ve got a pretty sad history of a few registrars abusing their discretion — which is part of why the National Voter Registration Act (the law that the SAVE Act would weaken) exists in the first place. Sadly, while most local registrars absolutely operate in good faith, there are increasingly registrars with an agenda, and while federal law currently protects voters against registrars with an agenda, the SAVE Act would substantially weaken those protections.”
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.