This is the third of a series of three voting stories. These stories first appeared in the March 2026 edition of the League of Women Voters of the Mother Lode’s Voter Newsletter. Although the following stories are fictitious, they are based on conversations with three real women in our Mother Lode area who talked about how the SAVE Act would affect them if it came to pass. These women’s stories are like those of thousands of women across the United States. [Note: Although the U.S. House of Representatives passed the renamed SAVE America Act in February, it appears to be stalled in the U.S. Senate due to filibuster rules.]
Every woman who changed her name when she married must again fight for her identity…to be herself and exercise her right as a United States citizen to make her voice heard. It now seems that a woman should just keep her maiden name. Forget tradition or risk losing your voice in our democratic process.
This is my predicament. As a married woman, moving to a new place, I must now jump through multiple hoops to register to vote in 2026. Never has this even entered my frame of reference before moving or taking on my husband’s name until now, and I am not unusual. I have recently remarried and moved, and now I must prove that I am a U.S. citizen. I have never lived anywhere but in this country. I have a passport, and I was told that’s what I need …but it has expired. So now I must dig deeper into my background. I need a birth certificate to prove I was born in the USA, and the name on my driver’s license doesn’t match the name on my birth certificate, nor does the name on my marriage license match my birth certificate. I was told after waiting some time at the county clerk’s office that I also must produce not only my birth certificate, but also my marriage license. And now that I’ve remarried, I also must provide a copy of my second marriage license. So, to prove I am the same person who has voted in the past 22 elections, I have a lot of work to do.
All of this requires contacting various offices in different parts of the country. This will take submitting my ID electronically, sending money, waiting for documents, assembling documents, and reappearing at the county clerk’s office, where I will be given the privilege to re-register to vote. This is a privilege I was given when I was first old enough to vote (at 18) in this country, and a right I have exercised multiple times as an adult. Re-registering has always been a simple process involving only one picture ID, and sometimes a Social Security card.
I’m not so sure my one vote is worth all this trouble. Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that’s the point of this new law. The stated aim of the law is to secure our voting process, ensure only citizens are voting in our national elections, and purge our voting rolls of non-citizens. I know that illegal aliens are not allowed to vote, as the current law states. Enforcing current law is all that is needed, so I am mystified. Why more bureaucratic nonsense? Why is this law written in such a way that I, a wife and mother, must now jump over all of these new hurdles to exercise my right to vote? Isn’t my vote as important as that of any other U.S. citizen?
Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash