Preregistration of 16 and 17 year olds can save money. FairVote crunches the numbers.

So why did North Carolina end preregistration:

The reason the North Carolina law is getting so much national attention is that it rolls into a single law all of the recent tools we have seen which make it harder to register and to vote. I’ve said it’s the toughest voting law we’ve seen seen enactment of the 1965 Voting rights Act And many components of the law cannot plausibly be justified on efficiency, anti-fraud, or voter confidence grounds. And the combination of cutbacks in early voting, end of same day voter registration, implementation of poll workers, and tightening of provisional ballot rules could well lead to long lines at the polls.

Sit down with some of the law’s supporters and the honest ones will have to concede that it will make it harder for some folks to register and vote. They will then need to fall back on the position that it is justifiable to make it harder for some people to register and vote. Listen to Susan Myrick on yesterday’s All in With Chris and you will hear her say that voters have 50 days to vote (I guess that’s including the absentee period) and therefore they have enough opportunities to vote under the new law.

So what if it is harder for (some) people to vote?

That’s a different world view than one which says that voting is about the sharing of political power among political equals and we should remove impediments impediments to voting which serve no valid anti-fraud or efficiency purpose.

More nefariously, the law is motivated by naked partisan purpose. On the preregistration, if young people tend to vote Democratic, this is a way to make it harder for new voters to vote for Democratic candidates.

And while the preregistration requirement likely is not motivated by racial animus, it will be interesting to see whether the cumulative impact of these voting rules on minority voters leads any court to conclude that they were motivated by an unconstitutional racial purpose. As I’ve said, that will likely require some evidence in discovery of a racial motivation. (Without proof of such a motivation, it will be impossible to get North Carolina recovered through the “bail in” procedures of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act.)