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Weekly Digest
Letter from an Editor | April 26, 2025
Dear John,
Earlier this month, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. If it passes the Senate and is signed by Trump (who has already tried to unilaterally implement such a requirement), the bill would require anyone registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship—a valid U.S. passport, or a photo ID presented with a certified birth certificate.
As we’ve previously reported, this presents a pretty big problem for a large group of people: women, especially married women who have changed their name, a group that numbers over 69 million. If the SAVE Act becomes law, any time one of those millions of women goes to register to vote for the first time or change their voter registration—maybe they moved to a new address—they could be turned away if the names on their identification and birth certificate don’t match.
The SAVE Act isn’t about safeguarding anything. Its clear goal is disenfranchising large groups of citizens, and in particular, disenfranchising women who tend to vote more Democratic.
Young women. Older women. Poor women. Rural women. Immigrant women. Black and Brown women. Widows whose marriages were decades ago. Survivors who changed their names to protect themselves. People who’ve always voted without issue—until now.
If you have any doubts about the intent behind this rights-robbing bill just look at the men behind it. First off, there’s Peter Thiel: billionaire MAGA donor, sugar daddy of J.D. Vance and a notable Trump ally. In 2009, Thiel said “the extension of the franchise to women” turned democracy into a joke. Then, there’s Mark Thompson, a GOP-endorsed North Carolina candidate for governor in 2024, who has publicly called for a return to the days when women couldn’t vote. There’s Trump-endorsed former Michigan Republican congressional candidate John Gibbs, who has praised efforts to repeal the 19th Amendment. And of course, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense and close Trump supporter allegedly believes that women shouldn’t vote—or work for pay, according to his former sister-in-law.
The SAVE Act now moves on to the Senate, which resumes its session next week. I’m urging you to call on your U.S. Senators—Republican or Democrat—to oppose the SAVE Act. And urge every woman you know to call too.
This comes on top of a week of repeated attacks on women by the Trump Administration. At the same time as the Administration is advancing its pronatalist agenda by offering women $5,000 to have a baby (which, as many of us know, is a tiny fraction of what it actually costs to birth and raise a child), it’s also cutting vital services that support women and their families. Threats to Medicaid funding, which pays for 41 percent of all births in the U.S., and SNAP, which disproportionately provides food assistance to women and their children, have intensified. The Administration has withheld almost $1 billion in federal grants to Head Start centers, and plans to shut down the program entirely. And sweeping cuts to Title X earlier this month now threaten to dismantle the reproductive healthcare safety net for millions. For being “pro-life”, they don’t seem to care very much about supporting living mothers and their children.
All this just underscores the importance of fighting for our right to vote. One hundred and five years ago, when suffragists were fighting for the right to vote, they told us to go home and be quiet. We didn’t. Let’s not start now.
For equality,
[[link removed]]
Kathy Spillar
Executive Editor
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In this episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin, Yamani Yansá Hernandez—CEO of the Groundswell Fund—joins Goodwin to discuss her journey from grassroots organizing to philanthropy, and what it means to fund reproductive, racial and gender justice through an intersectional lens.
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