Supporters say GOP’s SAVE America Act won’t affect women’s voting rights. Here’s why that’s false
After a recently uncovered video showed a leading champion of the SAVE America Act acknowledging that married women may face new barriers registering to vote if the draconian bill becomes law, anti-voting activists took to social media to claim that the bill makes special exceptions for married women.
In fact, the latest version of the bill does not include any special carve-outs for eligible voters whose current names differ from those on their identification documents. Included in that group are 69 million women who took their spouse’s last name when they got married.
As a result, the SAVE America Act would disproportionately affect women’s voting rights through its requirement that all prospective voters show documentary proof of citizenship — such as birth certificates or passports — to register to vote.
For millions of women, the name on their birth certificates does not match their current legal name. And the bill would force them to take new time-consuming and restrictive steps to register.
It’s not just women who would be affected. The requirements would apply to anyone who changed their name for any reason.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the SAVE America Act in the House this year, as well as in 2025 and 2024. He’s also been one of its foremost champions.
But though he has publicly downplayed and rejected concerns about how the bill could affect married women, Roy has privately recognized that they could face new restrictions if it became law, according to a video obtained by the independent media organization Call to Activism.
In the video, Roy acknowledged the issues that his chief of staff encountered when obtaining a new identification card after Virginia adopted the REAL ID system, which imposes similar requirements for proving name changes as the SAVE America Act.
Roy was speaking in February 2025, before the House had passed a previous iteration of the SAVE America Act.
After the video surfaced, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots and a strong proponent of the SAVE America Act, claimed on social media Tuesday that Republicans had completely solved that issue since Roy made those comments.
Martin asserted that the current version of the bill allows women to sign an affidavit certifying that they are who they say they are. However, the current text of the bill does not do that. It does lay out an affidavit process, but only for people who completely lack documentary proof of citizenship.
The bill, as passed by the House last month, describes a completely different process for people who have name discrepancies in documents and makes no special exceptions for them.
Instead, it mandates that those people must submit additional documents — such as marriage documents, divorce decrees or court orders approving a name change — in order to prove their identities. How much documentation an eligible voter would need to provide to prove their identity would be entirely up to the states.
“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,” the current version of the bill reads.
Some states could pursue aggressive requirements, thereby limiting the ability to register to vote, while others could adopt more lax requirements, making registration easier.
Cleta Mitchell, a prominent anti-voting activist who founded the election denial group Election Integrity Network, also backed Martin’s claims before falsely asserting that Democrats and voting rights experts only oppose the SAVE America Act because they seek to cheat in elections.
In reality, voting experts and several civil rights organizations are extremely wary of the bill because they know its proof-of-citizenship requirement alone will disenfranchise millions of Americans. And they know this because of similar state initiatives in the past.
In 2011, Kansas adopted a law requiring prospective voters to show documentary proof of citizenship to register. By the time that requirement was blocked by federal courts, it had prevented over 31,000 eligible citizens from registering to vote, including around 12% of all of those who had tried to register for the first time.
Voting advocates in Kansas have warned they see parallels between the SAVE America Act and the state’s previous proof of citizenship requirements, which they said disproportionately affected women and transgender people.
In a press briefing last week, Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas (D) noted how difficult obtaining documents proving name changes can be.
“Imagine a woman, divorced, she’s moved, changed her name and needs to update her voter registration,” Thomas said. “Under this bill, that is no longer a simple matter. It means tracking down multiple documents.”
