At a time when many states are making it harder to vote, 16 states have provided some good news over the last year by deciding to go in the opposite direction. In various ways, they have expanded access to the polls, allowing more people to register or to vote more conveniently. The list, compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice, includes these states:  • Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Virginia and West Virginia. They created online registration systems, a big improvement over unreliable and inconvenient paper systems.  • Colorado and Louisiana. They will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister when they apply for a driver’s license. Colorado also added Election Day registration, and it is encouraging mail-in voting without an absentee excuse.  • Maryland. It will allow same-day registration during early voting, which was expanded from six to eight days.  • Delaware. It will allow most felons to vote immediately after completing their sentences.  Some of these improvements took place in Republican-led states, a development that is all the more striking because many of the other states that are trying to keep people from the polls — 15 will have new restrictions on voting in November — are mostly controlled by Republicans.  These restrictions include voter ID laws, which are going into effect this year in 11 states, and cutbacks on early voting, which have taken place in eight states since 2011. One of the most pernicious ways to limit voting is to make it harder to register, as 10 states have done. Some limit voter registration drives, while others require documentary proof of citizenship, which many American citizens lack.  In all cases, these restrictions will make it harder for minorities and the poor to vote, which is the point, since proponents of such laws are trying to reduce the turnout of probable Democratic voters. A study last year by researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, found that states with a higher minority turnout were more likely to limit voting, and that the number of restrictions is related to the proportion of Republicans in power in a state.  That these laws persist demonstrates the need for Congress to repair the Voting Rights Act, which was stripped of its ability to prevent discriminatory election changes in the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision. As a recent report by the National Commission on Voting Rights notes, several of the new restrictions had previously been blocked by the Justice Department under its pre-clearance power in the act, which is no longer enforceable. Augusta, Ga., had tried to move local elections from November to the earlier date of the primaries, knowing that minority turnout would be far lower. The Justice Department blocked that move in 2012, but after the court decision, Augusta moved the date. Texas, meanwhile, put its new voter ID requirement, which had been blocked, into effect after the decision.  Making things worse, a federal judge last week refused to block North Carolina’s voting law, probably the most restrictive in the country, which was also passed after the Supreme Court decision.  Before that decision, the Justice Department’s powers were largely limited to a group of states and localities, mostly in the South, that had shown a history of racial discrimination in voting. Restrictions, though, are popping up all over the country: 34 states now have voter ID laws.  Congress needs to quit seeing voting in partisan terms and make it a fundamental right that cannot be limited by states trying to block access to the polls.  A version of this editorial appears in print on August 12, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Voting Is Now Easier. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
More than a dozen states have expanded democracy, but voter ID laws and other restrictions continue to pop up all over the country.