Do Democrats Want Voter Registration Abolished?

O ne of the problems with debates about voting laws is that many Democratic politicians and progressive commentators simply refuse to admit the premises of their own arguments. Their slogans are seductively easy: Government should never do anything to make it harder to cast more votes, and always do everything to make it easier to cast more votes. The trouble arises when you apply that logic blindly and reflexively to the real world: It means opposing the very existence of laws and rules governing registration and voting.

Laws, after all, make it harder to do almost anything — even when “harder” means that the process overall is easier because government imposes order, but requires citizens to take some affirmative steps to learn the rules and comply with them. Is it “harder” to drive because you have to obey red lights and traffic signs? Yes, because you are not free to do whatever you want; no, because the roads work better for everyone as a result. Conservatives believe that we should, in general, have fewer laws, but not no laws: We recognize that having some laws is necessary for order, and order is necessary for the exercise of a citizen’s liberty.

So, yes, having any rules at all makes it very marginally harder, in some very minimal ways, to cast more votes. Is that automatically bad in all cases? One wishes that progressives would apply some of this spirit of unyielding doctrinaire libertarianism to laws that make it harder to open and run a business, pursue a trade, keep one’s own wages, or exercise core constitutional rights to practice one’s faith, speak freely, or keep and bear arms.

Ask yourself the question that few Democrats or progressives seem willing or able to answer: Why do we register voters at all? What legitimate purpose does voter registration serve? It makes it easier to vote only in the sense that a voter can show that he is eligible to vote — but progressives oppose every law that is premised upon the state having a legitimate interest in checking to ensure that any voter is eligible to vote. And just about everywhere in the United States, everybody is eligible to vote so long as they are (1) a U.S. citizen, (2) age 18 or older, (3) a resident in the place they want to vote, and (4) not a convicted felon. Those are the only restrictions, and they are quite lenient.

Registration serves a number of functions. The state checks who is eligible to vote statewide. It registers the voter as belonging to a particular locality, with the right to vote in local elections. It assigns a precinct, to ensure that the voter’s vote is counted in the right elections. The registration list can then be used to confirm that the person voting has, in fact, been registered in that location. For it to be useful for that purpose, the list must be current and accurate. Democrats and progressives will not concede that these are at all legitimate functions; even if they give them lip service, any effort whatsoever to enforce any of them is treated as “voter suppression” and “a return to Jim Crow” and said to be based on a “myth” of voter fraud.

About that voter fraud “myth.” First of all, it’s not a myth that voter fraud happens. People get convicted of it every year. Elections periodically get thrown out — the last time it happened was way back in February 2021. Investigations find and document it. As with any crime, it is reasonable to assume that some percentage of it is never caught. That alone is a problem, because every year in America, there are elections for offices great and small decided by tens or hundreds of votes, or fewer. The House of Representatives, in which the Democrats currently have just an eight-seat margin of control, is currently reviewing a contest of a House race in Iowa decided by six votes. How exactly do Democrats — who are reportedly “dead serious” about overturning that election — justify the claim that voter fraud can never affect any election of any significance under any circumstances?

Nor is widespread, systemic voter fraud a myth in America — we know that it has happened in the past, sometimes in enormous quantities. As with individual incidents today, I could list for you many examples; the most notorious in living memory is the 1982 Illinois governor’s race, which featured dozens of convictions for Chicago Democrats submitting roughly 100,000 fraudulent votes.

What is unsupported by evidence is the theory that fraud on that scale still happens. If it’s still out there, we’re not seeing it — and an elephant that large would leave tracks. Thus, I tend to assume that voter fraud at an epidemic scale in America is, for now, a myth. But why is that? What is the explanation of Democrats and progressives for why we once had rampant voter fraud, but no longer have it? Again, one typically does not get an answer to this question. My own explanation is that it got easier to spot voter fraud by analyzing registration data. The FBI’s investigation of the 1982 race was a landmark because it was the first time computerized analysis was used to find voter fraud. Along the way, we have seen regular advances in how states keep their registration databases updated by purging former voters, and in how they check identification against the lists.

But does that mean we should stop using those tools? To put this in terms that we should understand during a pandemic: Why do we not currently have epidemic levels of, say, diphtheria? Because we vaccinate our kids against it now. If we stopped doing that, it would come back. In fact, that is exactly what has been gradually happening with measles outbreaks — the more people decided that it was safe to stop vaccinating their kids, the more the disease came back. Democrats and progressives are doing the same thing with voter fraud: systematically trying, through lawsuits and federal legislation, to tear down the existing safeguard structure of registration and identification that keeps voter fraud at levels that threaten only extremely close races.

Moreover, to continue the medical analogy, when viruses mutate or new vectors of infection appear, we have to keep up with the times. The 2020 elections saw a massive expansion of absentee balloting and the introduction of innovations, such as ballot drop boxes, that few states had previously used. As I have detailed at greater length, the most logical place for Republicans to look to preserve pre-2020 levels of security for the ballot is to bring mail-in voting and drop boxes up to the standards for in-person voting in order to recognize their growing importance. That is precisely what many of the commonsense reforms proposed by Republican governors and legislatures are doing.

Democrats and progressives continue to recoil at any effort to require voters, in person or by mail, to show identification to prove who they are. Yet many, many democratic countries around the world require voter identification of some form or another, including France, Canada, Mexico, India, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Italy, and Ireland. Even the reliably left-leaning PoliFact had to give Barack Obama a “half true” rating in 2016 when he implied that other countries don’t require photo ID to vote, noting that “Mexico and Canada each expects voters to present IDs at the polls . . . to vote in Mexico, every eligible citizen has to have a tamper-proof photo-ID card with a thumbprint and an embossed hologram.” Unsurprisingly, those countries vary in how they provide and check identification, what forms they use, and how they register voters — just as American states vary. But if your premise is that registration and identification of voters is inherently illegitimate, anti-democratic, and racist, then your position is a very extreme and isolated one indeed.

If Democrats and progressives do not believe that the disappearance of large-scale systemic voter fraud is caused by the registration and identification system, what did cause it? Do they really believe that nobody has a motive to tamper with American elections? These are the same people who spent four solid years claiming that Russians stole the 2016 elections with a handful of Facebook posts, or believe that Russians actually changed the vote totals. They are the same people who engaged in wild conspiracy theories that the Postal Service was hiding mailboxes to steal the 2020 election. It is difficult to take seriously the idea that Democrats and progressives truly believe that nobody has a motive to steal elections. But if the motive is still there and you remove barriers to the means and opportunity, what do you expect to happen?

Democrats and progressives will doubtlessly argue that this entire column is a straw-man argument. Of course we don’t want to abolish voter registration! they say. But if you accept the legitimacy of using registration for its intended purposes, then it swiftly becomes obvious that Republican proposals on the subjects of registration, identification, and verification are pursuing legitimate ends. Moreover, virtually all of them are exceedingly modest, asking only the most minimal responsibility from voters. If the disagreement between the two sides was really about the specifics of the proposals, they would not generate such outsized protestations of alarm, but would be the ordinary stuff of bipartisan negotiation. Quite a lot of those proposals, such as voter ID for in-person and mail-in voting, are also very broadly popular with the public. The blunderbuss attack on “making it harder to vote” is framed in such sweeping terms at such a high level of generality precisely in order to avoid addressing the disconnect between the “new Jim Crow” rhetoric and the mundane reality of, for example, requiring people to cast ballots in the right precinct. But if your argument leans so heavily on theory rather than practicality, as the Democrats’ does, you really ought to admit where the theory leads.