On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” left-wing pundit Elie Mystal called for Democrats to eliminate voter registration laws, because… I bet you can guess why.
“We could eliminate all voter registration laws,” Mystal said. “See, when Democrats get in charge, we try to protect voting rights, we don’t make voting easier.”
Mystal acknowledged that some voter eligibility requirements are necessary but questioned the need for pre-registration. “Now, I’m all for voter eligibility requirements. We might disagree about what those requirements should be,” he said. “But, you know, I’m gonna say that, like, there should be an age limit to vote. I might say 16, you might say 18, but I’m not gonna say eight, right?”
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were people on the left who did think that eight-year-olds should be able to vote, but I digress.
However, he took issue with the concept of pre-registration, calling it an arbitrary barrier. “Why do you have to pre-register? Why, why is that even a thing? It wasn’t a thing in this country at the founding. We didn’t have voter pre-registration in 1787,” Mystal argued. “We didn’t have voter pre-registration in 1821. We only started having voter registration, generally speaking, after the Civil War.”
So is Mystal suggesting that we should go back to the days when only white male property owners had the right to vote?
Obviously not. Actually, Mystal argues that the introduction of voter registration was rooted in efforts to suppress certain groups — including newly freed slaves — from voting.
“Why do you think that is? It’s because a bunch of freed African slaves were migrating up north, and all of a sudden, New York was like, ‘We need some registration up in here,’ right?” he said. “Bunch of immigrants from Europe, mainly, um, Ireland and, and Italy were, were coming to New York. People were like, ‘Oh, we need some registration in here.’”
Technically, voter registration dates back to 1800, when Massachusetts passed the first voter registration law. According to Time Magazine, “The assessors of every town or plantation were required to prepare lists of qualified electors, and in the towns these lists were submitted to the selectmen, posted, and revised prior to each election.”
There was a practical reason for such laws: “According to one explanation, old restrictions on voting were seen by some as undemocratic, but the growing population and expanding suffrage meant that it was no longer possible for polling officials to just recognize the voters by sight.”
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Now, while I won’t argue that the Democrats of the past didn’t use voter registration laws to disenfranchise black voters because we know that Democrats have a long history of denying black citizens the right to vote, that doesn’t make modern voter registration laws racist.
Of course, Mystal advocated for automatic voter registration, saying that the U.S. is an outlier in requiring pre-registration.
“If you’re eligible to vote, you should be automatically registered to vote, and that is how they do it everywhere else but us,” he claimed. “Everywhere else but us either has automatic registration or some other form of forced registration for everybody so that you don’t have this disconnect between eligible voters and registered voters.”
This is not exactly true. Automatic voter registration is not as common as Mystal suggests. According to my research, Argentina, Chile, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, and Mongolia have automatic voter registration.
There may be a few others, but here’s the rub: from what I can find, countries that have automatic registration also have voter ID requirements to ensure identity verification. I suspect when you have voters registered automatically, these countries figured out that you have to prove voters are who they claim to be. But wait, Democrats claim that voter ID laws are racist. So what does Mystal have to say about that? Are these countries racist for having voter ID laws?
Meanwhile, our supposedly enlightened neighbors to the north, Canada, don’t have automatic voter registration, but they do enforce voter ID requirements. I’d love to have the chance to ask Mystal if he thinks about that.
Mystal isn’t really concerned with expanding voting access; he’s focused on helping Democrats win. He’s convinced that Kamala Harris lost because of voter registration laws despite the fact that many states offer same-day registration, which proves that this isn’t the obstacle he claims it is. At the end of the day, whenever the left pushes for changes to election laws, it almost always means making election fraud easier.
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