AMERICA’S mid-term elections in November will be hugely consequential. If the Democrats capture the House of Representatives, as The Economist’s model suggests they have a three-in-four chance of doing, they will control congressional committees that now protect President Donald Trump from harsh investigation. If Republicans hold on, they can pick up their attempt to repeal Obamacare. Yet few Americans are expected to vote in the mid-terms. Last time, in 2014, just 37% of eligible voters turned out. Worse, many legitimate voters this autumn will be deterred or blocked from casting ballots.

In some states voters have been “purged” from the rolls in overzealous clean-up efforts (see article). Other states demand ever more documentary proof that people are eligible to vote. Well-off homeowners who drive cars and have passports barely notice such hurdles. But young, poor and ethnic-minority voters are more likely to crash into them. Often, this is not just an unfortunate side-effect of tighter voting rules; it is their intent. In Tennessee and Texas student ID cards are not acceptable forms of identification—though gun permits are fine.

The ostensible purpose of such rules is to prevent electoral fraud. If that were common, they might be justified. But diligent research by the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank, has turned up fewer than 1,200 instances of fraud since 1982, many of them by officials, not fake voters. Billions of votes have been cast since then. A commission to investigate illegal voting set up by Mr Trump was disbanded before it produced a report. In June a judge ruled that Kris Kobach, Kansas’s secretary of state and vice-chairman of the commission, had failed to prove that the statistics concealed an “iceberg” of unrecorded voter fraud in his state. “There is no iceberg,” the judge wrote, “only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

Voter purges and identification laws are anti-democratic. Particularly in the South, where the laws are most unbending, they seem to push America back towards the early 20th century, when blacks were systematically prevented from voting. Scare stories about fraudulent voting also distract from the genuine problem of meddling in American elections by Russia. In the long run, barriers to voting may even be bad for the Republicans who usually erect them. Every moment they spend thinking about how to make voting harder is a moment they do not spend thinking about how to attract new non-white voters—a puzzle they will have to crack eventually.

The Department of Justice used to prevent states from erecting barriers to voting. Under Jeff Sessions, it winks at such efforts. Mr Sessions, who is supposed to enforce laws that promote voting like the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, should reconsider. Though an early Trump backer, he has shown some courage and independence, enduring much presidential barracking and knocking down Republican demands for him to investigate the FBI.

Vote early, vote often

It would be better still if states made it easier to vote, not harder. There is no reason not to enroll voters automatically when they encounter state officials. A dozen states, not all of them left-leaning, do so already. Three-quarters allow people to vote early, by post; the most adventurous states, such as California and Colorado, are moving to postal voting by default.

One reform above all would boost turnout. Americans vote on Tuesdays not because the constitution says they must, but because of a law passed in 1845. So pass another one, creating a public holiday or moving national elections to the weekend (as in many democracies). Voting is worth celebrating.