Women Voters

Want to Protect the Vote? Become a Poll Worker

PUBLISHED 8/13/2026 by

For months now, hundreds of active and caring friends and supporters have been writing and calling us with a version of the same question: In addition to sending money, what else can I actually do?

Here’s one suggestion—and it may be the most useful thing you can do between now and Tuesday, Nov. 3: Show up as a poll worker, and get your friends to show up too.

We’ll keep calling out this war on women. But calling it out is not the same as helping to end it. The voter standing in a four-hour line in a shuttered-precinct district does not need our concern. She needs someone at the check-in table who showed up.

Let that someone be you—and your friends.

On the Voting Rights Act’s Anniversary, Short Film ‘Selma Sisters March On’ Captures 1965’s Fight for the Right to Vote

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

Aug. 6, 2026, marks the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the VRA sought to end Jim Crow-era voter disenfranchisement. Particularly in Southern states, voting officials routinely required Black voters to jump through hoops such as “literacy tests” or arbitrary rules such as having to name every county in the state before voting. Even if a Black voter managed to make it this far, election administrators sometimes intentionally sent them to the wrong location to vote, ensuring their vote never actually got counted.

The Voting Rights Act made it illegal for states to discriminate against voters by race, color or language-minority status, thereby reaffirming all U.S. citizens’ constitutional right to vote. The VRA also introduced additional changes to make voting more widely accessible, such as ballots in languages other than English and protections for blind, disabled and illiterate voters.

However, the VRA only became law after decades of struggle and widespread civil rights protests, including the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. Protesters, many of whom were young students, faced violent attacks from law enforcement, from tear gas to imprisonment, as they fought for their right to vote.

Sisters Alice and Denise Thomas were only 16 and 14 when they joined the Selma to Montgomery marches and other protests in their home state of Alabama before the VRA became law. In the new short documentary Selma Sisters March On, the Thomas sisters describe in their own words the fateful events of 1965 as they experienced them as high school-aged civil-rights activists.

The Voting Rights Act Turns 61 as New Threats to the Ballot Box Mount

PUBLISHED 8/5/2026 by

This year’s midterm elections have the power to dramatically alter representation in the current Republican-leaning Congress: All 435 congressional seats in the U.S. House are up for grabs, as is two-thirds of the Senate. Public health, women’s health, abortion access, the cost of living, healthcare affordability, immigration justice and a host of other issues hang in the balance.

However, the Trump administration is working to quietly disrupt voting this November, from firing the remaining U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) members, to continuing to challenge the legality of mail-in ballots and lobby the Supreme Court to do Trump’s bidding—part of an ongoing effort to expand federal control over election administration ahead of the midterms.

“There’s just this onslaught that’s coming from the administration itself, and then the judiciary,” Celina Stewart, CEO of the League of Women Voters, told Ms. “I don’t think it gives people a lot of confidence that [the Supreme Court justices] understand how important voting rights are … You can see the erosion on the Court as they move toward supporting the administration more and moving away from public discourse and public opinion.”

Thursday, Aug. 6, will mark the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. Congress passed the VRA in order to end post-Civil War and Jim Crow-era voter disenfranchisement, especially in southern states, by prohibiting “literacy tests,” mass voter challenges and other techniques states were using to stop Black Americans from voting.

On Saturday, Aug. 8, the League of Women Voters is leading a nationwide “Unite and Rise for Voting Rights” Day of Action to commemorate the VRA’s anniversary and call attention to SCOTUS’ attempt to decimate it. The Day of Action will also bring together League of Women Voters chapters and partner organizations across the country to lead hundreds of events with the goal of mobilizing voters before November’s midterms.

The Day of Action is part of the League’s Unite and Rise 8.5 initiative, started in 2025, which hopes to engage 8.5 million U.S. voters before November’s midterms—10 percent of the 89.2 million who did not vote in the 2024 presidential election.

And on the VRA’s anniversary on Thursday, Aug. 6, the League will host a virtual rally.

The Ranked Ballot Is the Pro-Women, Pro-Voter, Pro-Democracy Reform America Needs

PUBLISHED 7/1/2026 by

For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it.

The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.

We are overdue for the next chapter.

Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress. That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.

Ranked-choice voting changes that. The ranked ballot is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.

In a ranked-choice voting election, voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold.

Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.

(This is part of a new series FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of U.S. democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)

Trump Holds Housing Aid Hostage to Force GOP Support for Voting Restrictions

PUBLISHED 6/27/2026 by

This week, Trump cancelled a planned signing ceremony for the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—which would help address the worsening housing affordability crisis—and said he won’t sign it unless Republicans in the Senate vote to pass the SAVE America Act. If you recall, the SAVE Act would implement sweeping voting restrictions, including necessitating proof of citizenship to vote, and in doing so, make it much more difficult for millions of women who changed their name at marriage to vote.

His fixation on the SAVE America Act isn’t about safeguarding the elections for Americans—it’s about rigging the elections to ensure a Republican win, by suppressing the votes of those who disagree.

Trump’s Executive Order to Restrict Vote by Mail Is a Five-Alarm Fire

PUBLISHED 6/23/2026 by

Republican voters regularly use mail-in voting. Nearly one in five registered Republicans vote by mail. One in four Democrats does too.

Data on who votes by mail suggests that many Americans trust and rely on it.

Trump himself uses mail voting. He has defended casting his own ballots by mail, saying he did it “because I’m president” and “I had a lot of different things” to do.

Trump has repeatedly tried to restrict Americans’ ability to vote by mail. His latest effort, following several failed attempts, began with an executive order he signed on March 31: “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.” The order seeks to shift authority over federal elections from the states—which the Constitution grants primary responsibility for administering elections—to the federal government.

There are, of course, lawsuits challenging this executive order. The challenges to this executive order may well determine how and when you vote this November. So I asked my Brennan Center colleague Wendy Weiser, one of the lawyers in the League of Women Voters case, to share her perspective.

States Already Enacting Harmful SAVE Act Policies, Requiring Proof of Citizenship to Vote

PUBLISHED 5/20/2026 by and

Congressional Republicans are once again prioritizing the SAVE Act, legislation that would force Americans to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. The House has already passed yet another version of the bill, but so far it has stalled in the Senate.

If the SAVE Act becomes law, it would block millions of eligible American citizens from voting.

As the Senate considers the SAVE Act, state legislatures are advancing similar “show-your-papers” policies. Florida, South Dakota and Utah have enacted similar laws in recent weeks. Other states that already have similar laws have experienced the difficulties of implementing them.

Including Arizona, which has had a proof-of-citizenship requirement for over 20 years, five states will have a show-your-papers requirement for all voters for the 2026 midterms: Arizona, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. A sixth state, Louisiana, has one on the books that it has not yet implemented.

That’s a lot of strain on the election system to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The U.S. Senate would be wise not to inflict those obstacles on every election official nationwide.

FAQs About the SAVE America Act and Its Impact on Voters

PUBLISHED 3/2/2026 by and | UPDATED 3/25/2026 at 11:57 A.M. PT

As the SAVE America Act heads toward a Senate showdown, Republican leaders are preparing marathon debate sessions that could stretch late into the night. The legislation, backed by Trump, would require Americans to present documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, in order to register to vote in federal elections.

As the political fight intensifies, confusion about what the bill would actually require has spread widely online and across social media. Supporters describe the measure as a simple election-integrity policy, while critics warn it could create sweeping new barriers for millions of eligible voters who do not have ready access to the required documents—including many women whose current legal names may not match the names on their birth certificates after marriage.

To cut through the noise, Ms. has put together this guide to the SAVE America Act, answering common questions about what it would do and how it could affect your right to vote, including: Does a Real ID count? What if I can’t find my passport? And why are Trump and Republicans pushing so hard for this bill?

The SAVE Act Isn’t About Election Security. It’s About Blocking Women, Young and Low-Income Voters

PUBLISHED 2/23/2026 by

The SAVE Act—the Republicans’ attempt to strip voting rights from millions of Americans under the guise of “safeguarding” elections that are already quite safe—is now headed for debate in the Senate, and President Donald Trump is pushing hard for the bill. Top Democrats say the GOP’s real aim is to “rig the system” by putting paperwork and ID barriers in front of millions of currently eligible voters, and that the bill is part of a larger, ongoing effort to undermine trust in elections and reshape rules in Trump’s favor.

Under the SAVE Act, people would have to show “proof of citizenship,” in the form of a passport or a birth certificate, in order to be allowed to register to vote.

But 21.3 million people (more than 9 percent of Americans) don’t have these documents readily available, and at least 3.8 million don’t have them at all, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Just over half of Americans (51 percent) lack a passport, a document that is time-consuming and costly to acquire or replace.

The SAVE Act will also disproportionately impact women who have changed or hyphenated their names—which is over 80 percent of women married to men.

Likewise, elderly voters, young voters and voters without the financial means to acquire these documents will be overwhelmingly impacted.

Midlife Women Are a Sleeping Giant Voter Bloc in 2026—Even as the SAVE Act Puts Them at Risk

PUBLISHED 2/20/2026 by

Since 2024, there has been handwringing among politicos about the rightward shift of young male voters in the United States. And now, a new report from the centrist think tank Third Way predicts many of the “swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men” who support Donald Trump will sit out the midterms this year.

At the same time, it’s crickets when it comes to understanding the political engagement of midlife and older women. Even as “organized gangs of wine moms” dominated headlines in recent weeks, I’ve found vanishingly little interest in analyzing how that demographic energy might translate to electoral clout.