While looking for a late-night coffee, my wife and I recently found ourselves at a hip new D.C. restaurant<\/a>. Even though it was late on a Monday night, the host informed us that to get a table we would need to have made a reservation a week earlier at precisely 10:30 a.m. Fortunately, we were able to snag a seat that opened up at the bar, and our date night continued without further complications.<\/p>\n

Now, I\u2019m not complaining. It\u2019s a tiny bistro from an award-winning chef in one of the city\u2019s hottest neighborhoods. Of course I\u2019m going to have to do a little advance work to get in, and if I don\u2019t, well, there are a lot of other places in the city to get a cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

But as a country, we\u2019ve been applying this same model to voting, and it\u2019s a disaster. If you want to cast a ballot in November in Arizona \u2014 to name just one crucial swing state \u2014 you need to have registered to vote by Oct. 7<\/a>. If you didn’t, you’ll have to wait until the next election. (Rules vary<\/a>, so you may still be able to vote<\/a> in other states, and you can always request a provisional ballot<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

We have come to accept this sorry state of affairs, but it doesn\u2019t make any sense. You can be a U.S. citizen, at least 18 years of age, with no criminal record, and in many states you won\u2019t be allowed to cast a ballot on Election Day because you didn\u2019t file some paperwork anywhere from eight days to a month earlier<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You didn’t even need to register to vote for the first hundred years of the nation’s history.<\/p>\n

But this isn\u2019t a restaurant reservation; it\u2019s your right. The Constitution doesn\u2019t say anything about registering to vote ahead of time. As a matter of fact, you didn\u2019t even need to register to vote for the first hundred years of the nation\u2019s history; you just showed up at the polling place. Even today, you don\u2019t need to register if you live in North Dakota, the only state that still doesn\u2019t have a voter registration law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So why do we do it? Voter registration got its start<\/a> in the late 19th century in the Northeast, as cities became too large for poll workers to either recognize voters by face or handle the crush of people showing up on Election Day. But make no mistake, such laws were designed from the very start to suppress the vote<\/a>, especially votes from the immigrants arriving on American shores at the time.<\/p>\n

Consider just a few examples from Alexander Keyssar\u2019s comprehensive history \u201c The Right to Vote.<\/a>\u201d An 1866 law in New Jersey required all voters to register on the preceding Thursday \u2014 a day that blue-collar immigrant workers would be unable to take off. An 1885 law in Chicago required voters to register on one of two Tuesdays just before the election. And a 1908 law clearly targeting Jewish immigrants in New York City required would-be voters to register either on a Saturday or on Yom Kippur. Many of these laws did not apply to rural voters who were less likely to be recent immigrants.<\/p>\n

In the South, strict voter registration laws became part and parcel of a massive effort to disenfranchise Black voters in the post-Reconstruction era that included poll taxes and literacy tests.<\/p>\n

These efforts continue today. In Georgia, a new law that Republican activists are exploiting allows people to challenge the voter registrations of people they think might be ineligible. Since the law partially took effect in July, activists have challenged more than 63,000 voter registrations, mostly in majority-Democratic counties around Atlanta, according to a survey by The Associated Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For now, county officials are rejecting the vast majority of the challenges, but activists are pushing for them to throw out more registrations.<\/p>\n

Advocates for these kinds of purges argue that they are needed to \u201cclean up\u201d the voter rolls of people who have moved away. But there are already processes in place to remove voters who have subsequently registered in other counties, and some states even compare records<\/a> to help minimize duplicate registrations. Even if a voter remains on the rolls mistakenly, that\u2019s only a problem if they cast a ballot, and there\u2019s no evidence<\/a> that\u2019s happening in any kind of widespread way.<\/p>\n

I understand the concern. But if you want to remove the people from the voter rolls who shouldn\u2019t be there without removing people who should be there<\/em>, then there\u2019s a better way.<\/p>\n

It’s the ultimate fail-safe for voters who forgot to register before an arbitrary deadline.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s called same-day voter registration, and it\u2019s already the law in 23 states plus Washington, D.C.<\/a> Under these laws, people who show up to vote on Election Day but aren\u2019t on the voter rolls can register to vote right then and there. It\u2019s the ultimate fail-safe for voters who forgot to register before an arbitrary deadline or were mistakenly removed from the voter rolls by an overly aggressive purge.<\/p>\n

You might think of it as the democratic equivalent of getting a seat at the bar instead of at a table. You\u2019re still in the restaurant, and you can still get something to eat and a cup of coffee \u2014\u00a0even if you didn\u2019t plan ahead of time.<\/p>\n

If, as Republicans are fond of saying, they want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat<\/a>, supporting the expansion of same-day voter registration to all 50 states would make their arguments that aggressive voter roll purges are necessary a lot more convincing \u2014\u00a0and any purges a lot less damaging to legitimate voters.<\/p>\n

Because you can always get a cup of coffee in another restaurant. But if you\u2019re denied the right to vote on Election Day, there\u2019s no second chance.<\/p>\n

You can check your state’s voting laws online <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ryan Teague Beckwith<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for BLN. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine, Bloomberg News and CQ Roll Call. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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