The SAVE Act Could Threaten Voting Access—And Repeat History
People participate in a protest in front of the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on Presidents' Day, Feb. 17, 2025. Credit - Dominic Gwinn—Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images On April 10, 2025, the House of Representativespassed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Acton a largely party-line vote. Republicanshailed the billas a way to safeguard American elections from undocumented migrants voting. Critics, by contrast, warn it couldmake voting more difficult—if not impossible—for legally eligible voters. That's especially true fortens of millions of married women, who may not be able to provide the required documentation to prove their citizenship to register to vote. Presenting a birth certificate remains the easiest way to do so under the Act. However, many married womentake their husband's surnamesand therefore don't have birth certificates that match their current legal names. If the Senate passes the SAVE Act and President Donald Trump signs it into law, it will mean that millions of American womencouldfind themselves in the shoes of Ethel Mackenzie, an early 20thcentury suffragist. Like McKenzie, they might see their ability to register and vote inhibited due to a congressional effort to prevent non-citizens from voting. When Mackenzie tried to register to vote after California adopted woman suffrage in 1911, she was shocked to find out she couldn't—despite being born in the Golden State. The culprit: the1907 Expatriation Act, a federal law that stripped American women of their citizenship when they married non-citizens. Mackenzie's case exposed how nativist policies could harm not just immigrants, but also the rights of American women. Now, the Save Act threatens to do the same. In 1855, Congress passed theNaturalization Act. The law made any immigrant woman who married a citizen man into a citizen herself, as long as she met the racial requirements for citizenship. In 1868, the 14thAmendment established birthright citizenship for all people born in the U.S., except for American Indians and the children of foreign diplomats. Read More:Surprise over Trump's Gains With Latinos and Asian Americans Stems From a Flawed Assumption In the last three decades of the 19thcentury, however, nativist sentiment surged. In 1882, Congress passed theChinese Exclusion Act,banning Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. In 1892, Congress extended and expanded the ban in theGeary Act. And in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated the Gentleman's Agreement with Japan restricting Japanese immigration to the U.S. That same year, the State Department pressured Congress to pass the Expatriation Act. Officials argued that marriages between citizens and non-citizens were handled differently by different nations and without a uniform rule in the U.S., the department couldn't determine who was entitled to an American passport and protection while outside of the country. Advocates for women's suffrage thought the bill wasn't a good idea and expected the courts to find it unconstitutional. They believed it was was wildly out of step with the ongoing erosion of coverture, a set of legal practices that the State Department had specifically used to justify their recommendation to Congress.Coverturederived from English common law and dictated that women suffered "civil death" upon marriage. They ceased to have a legal identity, and instead became covered by their husband's legal identity. This left them unable to sign contracts or own property. Suffragists fought to curtail coverture. But they also pushed another agenda item—one that helped propel the passage of the Expatriation Act—disfranchising non-citizens. In the colonial era and the Early Republic, voting eligibility was often tied to property ownership and residency, rather than citizenship. As such, non-citizen voting was often legal and common. The practice surged again in the midwest in the 1830s, and was added to several state constitutions in the Deep South as a Reconstruction reform after the Civil War to counter the votes of unreconstructed white southerners. But in the nativist climate of the early 20thcentury, the practice had fallen out of favor, and suffragists and other progressives fought to end it. Some suffragists argued that immigrants opposed suffrage for women and prohibition, and therefore immigrant voting posed a threat to their agenda. Reflecting how the two concepts became intertwined, South Dakota, Texas, and Arkansas put amendments on their ballots to enfranchise women while simultaneously ending non-citizen voting. The amendments passed in South Dakota and Arkansas. As adoption of the Expatriation Act proved, the push to end non-citizen voting proved too powerful for suffragists to control. The new law made married women dependent citizens; their citizenship status was now entirely derived from that of their husbands. When McKenzie discovered that the new law prevented her from voting, she filed suit, arguing that Congress could not take away by law what the Constitution granted her by birthright. While suffragists expected the courts would overturn the Expatriation Act, the nativist sentiments of the day were stronger than the trend towards women's rights. In 1915, the Supreme Court ruled against Mackenzie. As Ohio RepresentativeJohn Cable summarized, the Court foundthat citizenship"was not such a right, privilege, or immunity that it could not be taken away by an act of Congress." The justices found that Mackenzie's decision to marry a non-citizen amounted to "voluntary expatriation." She was now stateless and unprotected in her own country. The decision left suffragists concerned that without married women' independent citizenship, suffrage would be an impossibility. Such fears proved wrong: in 1920 the ratification of the19thAmendmentprohibited states from barring women from voting on account of sex. Passage of the suffrage amendment encouraged Congress to revisit married women's independent citizenship, because it meant that immigrant women naturalized through marriage could vote, while American women denaturalized by marriage were disfranchised. The League of Women Voters, formed out of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, lobbied Congress for married women's independent citizenship. In 1922, they scored a partial victory when Congress passed theCable Act, which ended automatic denaturalization for American women if their spouse was an immigrant racially eligible for citizenship. The law also provided a pathway for denaturalized women to reclaim their citizenship. But it still excluded women who married Asian immigrants. Some politicians used this period of denaturalization strategically to their own advantage. In 1928, Ruth Bryan Owen, daughter of William Jennings Bryan, became the first woman to win election to the U.S. House of Representatives from a former Confederate state. But upon her victory, her opponent sued arguing that her period of denaturalization after marrying a British serviceman during WWI meant that she hadn't been a citizen for the previous seven years—a constitutional requirement to serve. The challenge forced Owen, a native born citizen; daughter of a three-time presidential candidate, congressman, and Secretary of State; and a duly elected official from Florida to plead her case before Congress. Her fellow lawmakers chose to seat Owen, rejecting the challenge that threatened to undo the will of her constituents. Read More:Voter Suppression Grew Up From the Soil of Emancipation Itself During the 1920s, Congress amended the Cable Act several times. Then, in 1933 the Senate voted to adopt the convention of the Pan American Conference, which argued that differences in nationality laws based on sex should be eliminated. The next year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Equal Nationality Act, through which American women achieved full, independent citizenship. Sixty years later, a new round of concerns of undocumented migration prompted Congress to make it acrimefor non-citizens to vote in federal elections. Lawmakers did so even though it hadn't been legal for non-citizens to vote in either state or federal elections in any state since Arkansas's ban went into effect in 1926. Republicans allege that the SAVE Act will help enforce this existing law. But instead, it threatens to disenfranchise millions of married American women. The law stipulates that people can prove citizenship either by presenting a REAL ID or a military identification card, if they confirm a person's citizenship status. But many can not, which leaves people registering to vote with the option of presenting a state identification card or driver's license in conjunction with a certified birth certificate that includes the "full name" of the applicant. It's this last provision which poses a problem for up to 69 million women who took their husband's name upon getting married. That means their birth certificates no longer include their full legal names. The law makes no allowances for such situations. It does leave room for states to decide which secondary documents to accept, but this would still be an additional burden on married women, could be applied unevenly across the country, and may open the door for challenges to election results—like the one faced by Ruth Bryan Owen—on the grounds that states didn't meet these onerous requirements. A century after the suffrage movement, the SAVE Act threatens to echo the harms of the Expatriation Act. While it's supporters claim it will target non-citizen voters, instead it could prevent American women from voting. Rachel Michelle Gunter is a public historian currently writing a book titled "Suffragists, Soldiers, and Immigrants: Drastic Changes to Voting Rights in the Progressive Era." Her series with the Great Courses, "Forgotten America: Rediscovering Events that Changed the Nation" premieres on May 9, 2025. She is on social media as @PhDRachel Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians.Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write toMade by History atmadebyhistory@time.com.
The SAVE Act Could Threaten Voting Access—And Repeat History People participate in a protest in front of the Capitol building in Washington ...
