New Hampshire Already Making It Real Hard For Some Married Women To Vote
Women who have taken their husband's name in marriage are having difficulty with the state's new voting law.
For the last few months, people all over have been sounding the alarm that the SAVE Act — a positively ridiculous and horrifying piece of Republican legislation aimed at keeping undocumented immigrants from voting — will also disenfranchise millions of Americans, particularly women who have changed their last names after marriage.
But is it hyperbole? Is it some worst case scenario situation that might not even happen in real life, but that the Left is using to make Republicans look bad?
Well, for those who were wondering what that would look like in practice, we have the state of New Hampshire, where a state law similar to the SAVE Act is being tested in the first election since it passed.
It’s not going well!
The new law, which Governor Chris Sununu enacted last September, requires newly registered voters to bring with them a passport or a birth certificate to prove that they are United States citizens — and their marriage certificates if they’ve changed their names. It’s being given its first test in several town elections, where so far multiple American citizens have either been forced to go back home multiple times to fetch proper documentation or rejected altogether.
Viah NHPR:
It took three trips, but Brooke Yonge was finally able to cast her ballot.
On her first trip to the Derry polls Tuesday morning, Yonge didn’t bring proof of her U.S. citizenship, a requirement under New Hampshire’s new voter identification law. So she drove home to grab her birth certificate, and then tried to vote a second time.
But there was another problem.
“It doesn’t have my married name on it,” she said. Town voting officials then sent her away a second time, to get her marriage certificate.
It’s hard to see what this is accomplishing, other than making it a pain in the ass to vote (which it’s hard enough to get people to do anyway). Lots of people don’t have their birth certificates on hand, or have lost documents in moves or in the mail. (My passport was lost in the mail!)
In Hopkinton, 70-year-old Betsy Spencer — who kept her ex-husband’s last name, but not her marriage certificate after a divorce — did eventually get to vote when the NH secretary of state’s office determined that her expired passport was sufficient-enough for an ID, but things very well could have gone the other way.
If you are thinking “Wow! They must have had some really serious issues with voter fraud and undocumented immigrants illegally voting in New Hampshire to be doing things this way,” you would be very wrong. The state has investigated just 36 cases of voter fraud since 2016, which led to just 15 convictions — not one of which involved an undocumented immigrant voting.
Rather, the Concord Monitor reported last year, “convictions over the years have involved out-of-state people voting in New Hampshire, people with homes in New Hampshire and another state voting in both states, and people voting in two different New Hampshire locations.”
It’s almost as if they just don’t want people to vote!
Republicans in New Hampshire and in Congress seem to believe they have psychic powers and thus wish to enact laws based on things they have divined either with the entrails of sacrificed animals or through their own human guts (which is not necessarily any more accurate). They have openly admitted that they have no proof it is happening, and yet they want to take away the rights of American voters in order to prevent it from happening.
"We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it's not been something that is easily provable," House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, told the press when Republicans introduced the SAVE Act last May.
No, we don’t all “intuitively” know this is happening, because most of us know how voter registration works. Most of us know that it’s hard enough to get American citizens to vote to begin with, and that undocumented immigrants really aren’t lining up to put themselves and their families at risk of deportation just to barely have their vote count.
The reason they feel they “intuitively” know this is the same reason they “intuitively” know that everyone who protests them or anything they want to do is being paid to do so by George Soros. They lack empathy and therefore cannot grasp the concept of people thinking differently than they do or disagreeing with them with anything other than nefarious intentions.
But no one intuitively knows anything. You can intuitively believe something, but you cannot know something without concrete evidence. In other words … facts don’t care about your feelings. If it’s not provable, you don’t get to claim it is true and you certainly should not get to enact legislation based on it, and you certainly shouldn’t be able to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote based on it.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I'm a perfectly legal immigrant with a Green Card and the whole shebang.
I can't vote. I know I can't vote. If I voted I'd get banged up for a few years on a federal charge and then deported. The whole thing is a pack of fucking lies to gull simpletons into believing in the Great Replacement theory.
I know I'm preaching to the perverted, but it's very simple.
Please, Wonkette. How can you ignore the fact that Canada has been sending sleeper agents into New Hampshire for years now, waiting for just the right movement to inflict universal healthcare on everyone.
Until you can admit the truth, you cannot see the brilliance of the solution!