A particularly egregious example involved a voter whose last name is “del Rio.” He was affected by the policy merely because the department of motor vehicles office where h e registered to vote did not allow spaces in last names. He was “delRio” there. But the voter rolls do allow spaces. No exact match. Voters like Mr. del Rio faced unnecessary hurdles, and poll workers were not trained properly to make sure that voices like his were heard.

Across the country, voter purges employ an easily manipulated “use it or lose it” rule, under which eligible voters who exercised their First Amendment right to abstain from voting in prior elections can be booted off the rolls.

Add to this mix closed or relocated polling places outside the reach of public transit, sometimes as far as 75 miles away, or long lines that force low-income voters to forfeit half a day’s pay, and a modern poll tax is revealed.

State legislatures have continued the trend this year. In Texas, officials are attempting to further criminalize eligible voters for inadvertent errors often caused by language barriers. In Tennessee, a state with notoriously low voter turnout, the legislature approved a bill subjecting third-party groups conducting voter registration drives to onerous requirements under threat of civil and criminal penalty.

In Florida, 1.4 million Floridians with felonies were re-enfranchised with a constitutional amendment last year that passed with 65 percent of the vote — the largest expansion of voting rights in a half-century. But the legislature has contravened the will of the people, once again disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of returning citizens through a bill that imposes an antiquated poll tax on them in the form of court fees.

After voters run gantlets to get on the rolls, they are undermined by the mismanagement of inexact voter databases, ancient and under-resourced machines, lost absentee ballots or by elections officials who refuse to count votes that were properly cast.

On election night 2018, as phones rang with tales of missing machines, provisional ballots allocated by a vague lottery system and regular voters vanishing from the rolls, I made a simple demand: Count every vote.