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Hillary Clinton wants to make it easier for people to vote. Why doesn't Chris Christie?

(Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)

You brought this on yourself, Republicans. Hillary Clinton is now making voting rights a cornerstone of her campaign platform.

She's introduced her most sweeping proposal yet, calling for changes in voter access laws that would make it easier for people to take part in elections.

This is the awkward consequence of passing dozens of discriminatory laws that lead poor and minority voters to be turned away at the polls. Clinton will call you out for it. By spotlighting GOP voter suppression, she's likely to motivate even more people to cast defiant ballots in 2016.

But beyond the political sense of this move, it's also just smart policy. Being forced to show up at the polls on Tuesday is not only a pain, it's a deliberate sabotage of the democratic process. Why not have voting over a stretch of several days? Why not automatically register all Americans?

Clinton would make those changes. She wants all citizens to be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18, with an opt-out for voters who don't want it. And she wants new federal guidelines for early voting, including opportunities for weekend and evening voting. This would make it as easy as possible for people to participate, cutting down on long lines and accommodating people who happen to work on a Tuesday.

She is also pushing to repeal punitive state laws that ban millions of people people with criminal records from voting, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

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Turnout in our 2102 election, somewhere around 53.6 percent, ranked the United States 31st among the 34 highly developed states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That's embarrassing. Many other countries hold their elections on weekends or holidays. The ones with the highest turnout have universal registration. We are a global outlier in this regard.

When Oregon alone passed a law automatically registering eligible citizens who have drivers' licenses, it immediately added 300,000 voters to the rolls. We could expand that exponentially under Clinton's vision.

In response, Gov. Chris Christie said Clinton "doesn't know what she's talking about on voter rights."

Nice try. She's talking about indefensible acts like his veto of a bill that would have permitted early, in-person voting in New Jersey -- one he now claims would "increase the opportunities for fraud."

Experts have laid that voter fraud boogeyman to rest. In-person voter fraud happens at a rate of 0.0004 percent -- less than the chance a person will be struck and killed by lightning. This bill would have helped avoid all the errors and logistical problems of absentee voting, which was especially nightmarish after Hurricane Sandy.

Clinton is defending a fundamental right in our democracy. Why is Christie looking to deny it?

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