Jeanne Shaheen, N.H. senator: It’s time to replace Andrew Jackson’s face with a woman on $20 bill

New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is pushing legislation that could lead to the replacement of former president Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill with a woman.

The Women on the Twenty Act would set up a committee of citizens tasked with recommending a choice to the treasury secretary, The Associated Press reported Friday.

A similar effort has been pushed by lobbying group Women on 20s, which wants to see new $20 bills by the year 2020 — the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.

“I think there are a lot of opportunities that we sometimes don’t think about to point out the significant contributions women have made in U.S. history,” the senator said, AP reported, “And this is one of those opportunities.”

Women on 20s conducted an online survey of more than 230,000 participants to determine four final contenders for the new $20 bill: former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, abolitionist Harriet Tubman, civil rights activist Rosa Parks, and former Cherokee Nation Chief Wilma Mankiller, AP reported.

But the winner of the poll might not necessarily end up on the new bills.

“We are not under any illusions that the person who comes out of our polling will be the person who ends up on a bill because there is a process and that process usually involves empaneling a group of experts to make certain design choices,” Susan Ades Stone, the executive director of Women on 20s, told Mediaite on Friday.

The $20 bill is already overdue for a redesign, bills are supposed to be redesigned every ten years to prevent counterfeiting.

“It’s long overdue for that reflection to include the contributions of women,” Ms. Shaheen said in a statement on her website. “The incredible grassroots support for this idea shows that there’s strong support for a woman to be the new face of the twenty dollar bill.”

A spokesman for Ms. Shaheen told Mediaite that the goal to put a woman on the $20 bill specifically did not have anything to do with President Jackson’s face currently being on the bill, but that the main objective in choosing the $20 was to take the “opportunity to make a bigger impact,” because the $20 is seen and used more frequently than the $50 or $100 bill.