‘The 19th Amendment was a bad idea’: The far-right’s wish list for extreme voter suppression

President Donald Trump and the GOP are attacking voting rights through executive orders to roll back mail-in voting and the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict ID requirements. 

But to some far-right Christian influencers, that’s small potatoes. 

They’re pushing for even harsher voting restrictions. Among them: revoking women’s right to vote, instituting “family voting,” and only allowing property owners the right to vote. 

These ideas haven’t made it into legislation — yet. But they’re growing in popularity among far-right Christian nationalists, many of whom are motivated by a belief that women should have no role at all in public affairs. 

Kai Schwemmer — an influential conservative influencer who was recently appointed as political director for the College Republicans of America — said in an online debate last year that women shouldn’t be able to vote, according to The Guardian. 

“I believe they currently have the right to vote,” Schwemmer said. “But I’m in favor of probably like a family voting thing. I think that’d probably be a better way to do it.”

Family voting is a concept championed by Christian nationalists that only allows the patriarchal head of a family’s household to cast a vote on behalf of his wife and children.  

Schwemmer — whose supporters describe him as a “Mormon Nick Fuentes,” the far-right streamer known for his misogyny and antisemitism — is hardly the first influential figure on the right to call for family voting. 

In August 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a CNN interview with Doug Wilson, Hegseth’s Christian nationalist pastor, who doesn’t believe women should vote. 

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” Wilson told CNN. “The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three or four or five eternal souls.” 

Just before the 2022 midterm elections, as polling showed Democrats were performing well with women voters, another conservative pastor and YouTuber, Joel Webbon, tweeted that “the 19th Amendment was a bad idea.” He’s since used his large platform for misogynistic rants where he regularly advocates for revoking women’s rights. 

“A woman as a mother is a precious gift, but a woman as a civil magistrate is the death of the nation,” Webbon recently posted on social media.

In 2024, Dale Partridge, another Christian nationalist pastor, posted on social media that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction.” In January 2025, Partridge said Congress should repeal the 19th Amendment because he thinks women are too empathetic. 

“I don’t think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I don’t love women,” Partridge said. “I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.” 

Even the powerful venture capitalist and conservative activist Peter Thiel once wrote that he thought the women’s suffrage movement was bad for democracy.

“I used to teach this as, ‘This is this fringe thing that’s out there,’” Beth Allison Barr, a history professor at Baylor University, told the New York Times. “Now I teach it as, ‘This is no longer fringe’…It’s being made to sound more palatable and reasonable.”

Not allowing women to vote isn’t Schwemmer’s only controversial view. In the same debate where Schwemmer expressed support for family voting, he added that he’s “very much an anti-universal suffrage guy.” 

“I don’t think there’s a good defense for allowing people to vote who don’t take the time to return shopping carts,” Schwemmer said. “I think that’s a huge issue.”

Schwemmer is referencing the shopping cart theory — a litmus test that distills a person’s entire morality into whether or not they return a shopping cart to its designated cart corral when they’re done shopping. As outrageous as it sounds, far-right figures are constantly scheming up new ways to shut out voters. 

“Allowing those people the same leverage in your electoral system as a homeowner,” Schwemmer added. “That’s crazy to me.”

Allowing only homeowners the right to vote is a form of voter suppression that dates back to the 1800s — but conservative activists besides Schwemmer have floated reviving the practice over the years, which would stand to disenfranchise millions of voters. 

Among the most prominent may be Steve Bannon, the popular podcaster and former senior advisor to Trump. A former colleague of Bannon told the New York Times in 2016 that he “occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.”

Back in 2012, Ted Yoho, a former GOP congressman, said at a campaign event that only property owners should vote. 

“I’ve had some radical ideas about voting, and it’s probably not a good time to tell them,” Yoho said. “But you used to have to be a property owner to vote.”

Since then, allowing only property owners to vote hasn’t come up much among GOP lawmakers, but as conservatives fervently push to restrict voting with the SAVE America Act, more right-wingers are reviving the proposal. An op-ed in the online conservative magazine The American Thinker last year advocated only allowing property owners to vote.

“We must require that voters meet certain reasonable standards of competence,” the writer, Robert Arvay, argued.

With the SAVE America Act still being pushed by the GOP, conservative influencers are using the opportunity to push for other extreme anti-voting measures. Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder recently posted on social media that, in addition to family voting, only people in “mandatory selective service” should be allowed to vote.

Crowder also said that only people who “have at least three years of gainful employment and are currently paying taxes,” should vote, too.

“Those who only stand to gain will always vote for more gain,” Crowder wrote.