CT Registrars Weigh In on SAVE Act Voting Concerns

Connecticut Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas says her office has been flooded with calls from women voters who don’t know whether the federal SAVE Act would cancel their eligibility to vote. Local registrars, for their part, can’t tell them.

Thomas raised the issue publicly after a town hall in Stamford, where the concern dominated the question period. Women want to know whether they need to legally change their name, renew a passport, or get updated identification documents before they can remain on the rolls.

“The number one question we have been getting is from women asking if they should legally change their name or get a new passport or get some form of ID,” Thomas said.

The worry isn’t abstract. The SAVE Act is actually three separate pieces of federal legislation grouped under one name. It would require documentary proof of citizenship to register and extra documentation to cast an absentee ballot. For women who changed their last names after marrying, that’s a specific problem: if the name on a birth certificate doesn’t match the name on current ID, they’d need to produce both documents plus a marriage certificate to establish a chain of identity. That’s three documents, from three different sources, for a right they already have.

Thomas tried to gauge just how hard it would be to pull those records together. She went looking for her own birth certificate. She couldn’t find it. “I went to the box where I thought it was, but it wasn’t there, and I’m like, ‘oh, no, it’s somewhere in my attic, my basement or my safe deposit box, and I don’t know which, and I still haven’t found it because I’m busy and I haven’t had time to keep looking for it,” Thomas said. She kept her last name after marrying, so she doesn’t face the name-mismatch issue herself. But if the Secretary of State can’t locate her own birth certificate on short notice, the expectation that ordinary voters will do it under pressure is worth examining. Connecticut residents who need to obtain a copy can go through the Connecticut Department of Public Health, which handles vital records requests statewide.

Thomas told the Stamford audience she thinks the SAVE Act won’t pass in its current form. She may be right. But she said registrars across Connecticut have told her it’s hard to prepare for any scenario because federal guidance has been sparse and inconsistent. Local offices are already fielding more calls than normal from voters who want clarity that nobody in the system can currently provide.

Not every registrar sees the confusion as a problem worth solving. According to CT Mirror, two Republican registrars said they support stricter documentation rules. Both pointed to the 2023 Bridgeport mayoral primary as evidence that Connecticut’s election system needs stronger safeguards.

One of them, Louis DeCillio, the Republican Registrar of Voters in Stratford, said he backs the added requirements even while acknowledging that municipalities don’t yet have a clear picture of how they’d implement a federal mandate. He wasn’t sympathetic to concerns about the name-mismatch burden on married women.

“If they have a birth certificate with a different name and then they show their marriage certificate with their new name, that should be the fix,” DeCillio said.

“What’s so hard about that?”

Plenty, Thomas’s office would argue. Tracking down a birth certificate takes time. Marriage certificates have to be located or re-ordered. For voters who moved across state lines, changed names multiple times, or simply don’t have a filing system in their attic, the chain can break at several points. The Secretary’s office hasn’t put a number on how many Connecticut women voters changed their names after marriage, but the population is large by any reasonable estimate.

Registrars divided on policy, voters uncertain about their status, and federal guidance still unresolved. That’s where Connecticut stands heading into 2026 elections. Thomas hasn’t found her birth certificate yet either.