This past weekend, people gathered in Bend, Redmond and other cities around Central Oregon for yet another No Kings demonstration against the Trump administration. By the way we figure it, if the protests keep happening, the numbers only stand to grow.
So much of the proposed legislation being proposed by the federal government is about positioning one sector of the electorate against another. Citizens versus immigrants. Christians versus Muslims. Us and our tariffs, versus them and their trade deficits.
And now, it appears the next targets in this binary game of friends and enemies are married women, and anyone who’s ever changed their name.
Many will have heard about the disastrous Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which passed the House in February and is under consideration by the U.S. Senate. The bill, touted as a safeguard against noncitizen voting (something that’s already illegal) adds onerous new voter registration requirements for voting in federal elections, including providing documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, and imposing new, strict photo i.d. rules, including providing copies of photo i.d. with mail-in ballots.
If passed, the bill would go into effect immediately, giving states like ours, with widespread mail-in voting and automatic voter registration through Driver and Motor Vehicle Services, very little time to pivot. Likewise, the some 69 million married American women who lack a birth certificate with their legal name on it would be sent scrambling to obtain the proper documentation. The most recent version of the bill adds a provision allowing people to add a legal attestation, accounting for their new names, but that is still extra paperwork for a process that has in recent years become so automatized and dependable.
As the Fair Elections Center, a nonpartisan voting rights organization, put it, “There is no reason to pass any version of the SAVE Act other than to make it harder to vote, undermine election integrity and confidence, and promote completely baseless made-up conspiracy theories about widespread non-citizen voting.”
In the instances that there have been cases of non-citizens voting, the numbers didn’t outweigh the numbers who will be disenfranchised by any stretch. According to analysis by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, an audit by the Secretary of State in Georgia found nine cases of non-citizen voting in that state; meanwhile, some 46,000 people of voting age in Georgia currently lack access to the documentary proof of citizenship that would be needed to vote under the new law.
It’s not partisan, either. In total, some 4.6 million unaffiliated voters (14%), 9.7 million Democrats (10%) and 7.1 million Republicans (7%) don’t currently have easy access to the right documents, the Center reported.
Here in Oregon, people were rightly concerned when the DMV uncovered roughly 1,500 ineligible people being added to Oregon’s voter rolls. In total, some 38 people wrongly voted in Oregon in 2022 and 2023. But we can feel confident that the system is working as it was intended. Oregon officials discovered inconsistencies, investigated, and found that often, the problems rested in recording errors by the DMV itself. Sometimes DMV workers recorded a foreign passport number as a U.S. one, or recorded a person from the U.S. territories of Samoa and Swains Island as being eligible to vote in federal elections, when they are not. That process, of the system scouring for errors and then fixing itself, should restore confidence that our elections officials are not asleep at the wheel.
When the SAFE Act came before the U.S. House, Rep. Cliff Bentz, who represents the eastern side of the state and portions of east Bend, voted in lockstep with his party and voted yes. This is a person who was elected in a state whose motor-voter laws and mail-in voting systems ensure high voter registration numbers and relatively high voter turnout; whose constituents, in many rural parts of the state, live in places where obtaining new documents in order to vote is not as easy as taking time out of the lunch hour. If passed, we’d argue that the rural voters of Congressional District 2 will be among those hardest-put to comply.
Perhaps the saddest part about all of this is, even simply having doubts about the integrity of an election, could make some people opt not to take part. So even if none of this baseless legislation makes it to the president’s desk, it’s causing harm.
With a large percentage of American women at risk of being disenfranchised due to this latest ploy, how long before this game no longer includes an “us” at all?
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