While looking for a late-night coffee, my wife and I recently found ourselves at a hip new D.C. restaurant. 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.
Now, I’m not complaining. It’s a tiny bistro from an award-winning chef in one of the city’s hottest neighborhoods. Of course I’m going to have to do a little advance work to get in, and if I don’t, well, there are a lot of other places in the city to get a cup of coffee.
But as a country, we’ve been applying this same model to voting, and it’s a disaster. If you want to cast a ballot in November in Arizona — to name just one crucial swing state — you need to have registered to vote by Oct. 7. If you didn’t, you’ll have to wait until the next election. (Rules vary, so you may still be able to vote in other states, and you can always request a provisional ballot.)
We have come to accept this sorry state of affairs, but it doesn’t 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’t be allowed to cast a ballot on Election Day because you didn’t file some paperwork anywhere from eight days to a month earlier.
You didn’t even need to register to vote for the first hundred years of the nation’s history.
But this isn’t a restaurant reservation; it’s your right. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about registering to vote ahead of time. As a matter of fact, you didn’t even need to register to vote for the first hundred years of the nation’s history; you just showed up at the polling place. Even today, you don’t need to register if you live in North Dakota, the only state that still doesn’t have a voter registration law.
So why do we do it? Voter registration got its start 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, especially votes from the immigrants arriving on American shores at the time.
Consider just a few examples from Alexander Keyssar’s comprehensive history “The Right to Vote.” An 1866 law in New Jersey required all voters to register on the preceding Thursday — 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.
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.
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.
For now, county officials are rejecting the vast majority of the challenges, but activists are pushing for them to throw out more registrations.
Advocates for these kinds of purges argue that they are needed to “clean up” 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 to help minimize duplicate registrations. Even if a voter remains on the rolls mistakenly, that’s only a problem if they cast a ballot, and there’s no evidence that’s happening in any kind of widespread way.
I understand the concern. But if you want to remove the people from the voter rolls who shouldn’t be there without removing people who should be there, then there’s a better way. It’s the ultimate fail-safe for voters who forgot to register before an arbitrary deadline. It’s called same-day voter registration, and it’s already the law in 23 states plus Washington, D.C. Under these laws, people who show up to vote on Election Day but aren’t on the voter rolls can register to vote right then and there. It’s 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. You might think of it as the democratic equivalent of getting a seat at the bar instead of at a table. You’re still in the restaurant, and you can still get something to eat and a cup of coffee — even if you didn’t plan ahead of time. If, as Republicans are fond of saying, they want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, 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 — and any purges a lot less damaging to legitimate voters. Because you can always get a cup of coffee in another restaurant. But if you’re denied the right to vote on Election Day, there’s no second chance. You can check your state’s voting laws online here.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. 
