IMAGINE that officials in California pass legislation making it deliberately onerous to own a gun. They enact every roadblock favoured by the gun-control community and then some. They mandate background checks, waiting periods and burdensome paperwork. They restrict the number of gun shops in the state to two, both state-owned. They make it illegal to bring a gun in from out of state. They send threatening letters to all suspected gun owners telling them the state believes they possess an illegal weapon and that they must prove the weapon's legality or risk a felony conviction and five years in prison. When pressed, the sponsor of this legislation denies he opposes gun ownership. He says he just wants to make it as hard as possible to own guns so that gun owners really appreciate their rights.

Of course, this would never happen. It would be electoral suicide, thanks both to the NRA and, more broadly, to the unseemliness (at least) of an elected official, who swears an oath to defend the constitution, advocating the deliberate restriction of a constitutional right.

But no such indulgence seems to extend to elected officials who make it hard for citizens to vote. Florida passed a law in 2011 that imposed heavy burdens on people who register voters—heavy enough that groups such as the League of Women Voters, which has been registering voters across the country for 92 years, simply shut down their registration drives. The law required groups to turn in registration forms within 48 hours of their being filled out, or face a $1,000 fine. It imposed burdensome record-keeping requirements. Forms from Florida's secretary of state told registration agents that they "could be imprisoned for five years for sending in a voter registration application that includes false information, even if the registration agent does not know or have reason to believe the information is false"—a statement that happens to be untrue, as that is not the law. Michael Bennett, the senator who sponsored this legislation, said, "I want the people in the state of Florida to want to vote as badly as that person in Africa who is willing to walk 200 miles for that opportunity he’s never had before in his life. This should not be easy." A federal judge struck down that law at the end of May. He also sharply rebuked Mr Bennett, telling him that Florida "doesn't have an interest in making it hard to vote. That's not a permissible goal."

The same judge had the opportunity to enjoin another odious voting law in Florida, one in which Florida's secretary of state tried to get all non-eligible voters off the voter rolls by consulting a list so riddled with errors that most county election chiefs simply refused to use it. The list, which contained duplicate names as well as dead voters who had already been removed, identified almost 2,700 potential non-citizens, 87% of whom happen to be minorities. Around 500 turned out to be citizens; 40 were not, and were removed from the rolls. I spoke to one of the targeted citizens last Monday: Suly Anselme, a bluff, courtly former train engineer who emigrated to Miami from Haiti in 1994 and became a citizen in 2004. He received a letter saying he may be ineligible to vote, and telling him that voter fraud was a felony. His first thought was terror: he had already voted in two elections; he was worried about going to jail. It ended happily for Mr Anselme once he proved his citizenship, but he is politically engaged. He said he knew many others—newly naturalised citizens—who were frightened, and who did nothing, and who would have been thrown off the voter rolls had Florida's secretary of state not suspended the purge (which is why the judge declined to enjoin; he warned that if the purge resumes he could reexamine the request).

Supporters of this law, and of voter-ID laws generally, may contend that every vote cast by someone who should not be on the voter rolls casts doubt on the election's outcome. But if so it ought to be equally true of every vote not cast by an eligible voter kept away from the polls.