Actress Elizabeth Banks posted a video to her Instagram account claiming that the SAVE Act makes it hard for women to vote. And she is hoping her fans call their representatives to vote “no.”
“I have voted since I was 18. The SAVE Act would make that much HARDER for me to do. Stop it. Tell your reps it’s no good,” the Hunger Games actress wrote to her 4.2 million followers in her March 25 instagram post.
In her video she made the claim that women who have changed their name are somehow unable to get ID that rectifies their birth names to the names they legally changed to by marriage or other reasons.
She also claimed that having to get a passport that costs “$100” is a “poll tax” that is “unconstitutional.”
Telling America to “stop it,” Banks says that the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or the SAVE Act (HR 22) will hurt women.
“I’m gonna show you who it hurts,” Banks says in her video. “So, this is my birth certificate… I was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, these are from the city of Pittsfield office of the city clerk. They say Elizabeth Mitchell. Because that was my birth name.”
“So, like millions, and millions, and millions, and millions of women, I changed my name — but not through marriage. I changed it to my professional name, Elizabeth Banks.”
Banks then flashes her California driver’s license that she notes has her professional name emblazoned upon it.
She adds that she isn’t even sure when she officially changed her name and does not know if the original paper work was filed in New York City or in Los Angeles.
“The point is, it was 27 years ago,” she continued. “And I would have to go find that paperwork to, I guess, show someone why these two things don’t match.”
“They just don’t match. And they are never gonna match,” she adds. “And they’re not gonna match for a lot of people.”
She went on to discount anyone who tells her she is perfectly fine because she has a passport, and asks, “How many millions of Americans don’t have a passport?”
“Passports cost an hundred and something dollars to get,” she replies. “That is a poll tax. It’s unconstitutional.”
“We are not going to require people to get a passport to vote. This is a right enshrined in the Constitution,” she concludes. “Stop making it harder for people to vote. Start making it easier. We know who benefits and who doesn’t. Stop it.”
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt recently debunked the claim that women who change their name after marriage would be blocked from voting if the SAVE Act were passed into law.
“As far as married women who have changed their name, if they are already registered to vote, they are entirely unaffected by the act,” she said during a March 10 White House press conference.
She also addressed the baseless claim that blacks would be disenfranchised because they are too stupid to know how to get a valid ID.
“Regarding Democrats’ claims that this will disenfranchise blacks and minorities, Leavitt said, “I think it’s INSULTING that the Democrats are saying that there are groups of people in this country who are not smart enough to update the documentation to allow them to vote.”
The SAVE Act does not say that a woman’s birth certificate and current ID have to match to make her eligible to vote. It simply requires her to show she was born in the U.S.
Further, the SAVE Act also requires states to set up their own systems to “establish an alternative process under which an applicant may submit other evidence to demonstrate U.S. citizenship.” Meaning each state will be required to rectify the conflicting birth name and married name issue.
So, in the end, the SAVE Act does not say that a woman’s birth certificate and her current IDs must have the same name to make her eligible to register to vote.
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