Women’s History Month is always a time to reflect on the privileges I enjoy and the brave women before me who paved the way for me to have them. It’s because of them that I’m able to study and work to make a difference in our democracy.
Yet, the joy of WHM is being dimmed by the far-right’s constant attacks on young women’s rights.
I started organizing with Voters of Tomorrow — the largest Gen Z-led voter outreach organization in the country — when I was 14 years old, because I wanted to make sure that people my age, especially young women, feel empowered in the democratic process. That is becoming increasingly difficult — just recently, President Donald Trump called on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would disenfranchise millions of women and young people across the country.
It’s already difficult enough to vote as a college student. When I moved from Connecticut to North Carolina to start college this fall, I was so excited to switch my voter registration and play a role in such a competitive state for my first major election. But the process to change my voter registration was more time-consuming and confusing than I imagined.
As someone without a North Carolina driver’s license, I couldn’t change my registration online. With all the things I had to do — printing out a form, filling it out, buying stamps and envelopes, finding a place to drop it off, mailing it in to the county board of elections, and sorting out North Carolina’s Voter ID laws — I was more than a little overwhelmed by the process. And remember, as the current chief of staff at Voters of Tomorrow, it’s literally my job to get young people to vote. Without my passion for voting and access to helpful resources, I may have given up. Many of my peers do. Logistical barriers like these prevent one in three young people from voting.
The SAVE Act would only exacerbate these barriers. By requiring in-person voter registration and imposing new identification requirements and a strict name-matching rule, the SAVE Act would make the process worse for everyone, everywhere — including college students.
If passed, Voters of Tomorrow estimates the SAVE Act would leave 17 million young people functionally unable to vote. The SAVE Act would require people to register in-person at a county clerk’s or elections office, even though young people are significantly more likely to register when they can do so online. In some rural areas, county offices are hundreds of miles away, and getting there is only the beginning.
The bill also demands original copies of documents that prove citizenship, which most young people don’t have on hand. Acceptable proof of citizenship includes passports, which most of my peers don’t have, or birth certificates, which many college students keep at home with their parents. The bill also hurts young voters by creating a strict national photo ID requirement that would exclude most student IDs and ending universal mail voting programs that thousands of out-of-state students rely on.
But perhaps even more harrowing, especially during Women’s History Month, the SAVE Act is a direct attack on women. The bill would require a voter’s current name to exactly match the name on their proof of citizenship documents. Since women are far more likely to change their last names upon marriage, this provision effectively suppresses women’s votes without saying the quiet part out loud. Almost 70 million women in the United States do not have a birth certificate that matches their current ID. And sure, they could use a passport, unless they’re part of the half of the country that do not have passports. Despite the White House’s claims to the contrary, it’s hard to see this legislation as anything except a way to restrict our access to the ballot box and silence our voices.
As a young woman, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared about the world we live in right now. It seems impossible to open social media or read the news without seeing another attack on my generation and my gender from the far-right. This work feels more challenging every day, but it’s important to remember that thousands of women felt this way once too. I’m sure the leaders of the suffrage movement didn’t think their work was easy while fighting to ratify the 19th Amendment, but they succeeded. Looking back, the resilience of prior generations fills me with hope that once again, we will win.
We can and will organize and pressure our leaders in Congress to stop this bill. And this November, we must show up to vote no matter what, ready to unseat anyone who wants to take our rights away. Our voices matter. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to take them away from us.