We are now three weeks to Election Day, which means we are deep into another round of the voting wars—the ceaseless legislative, legal and regulatory battle over which Americans can vote, and when and where and with what paperwork they must do so. Here's a modest proposal: How about we finally call off the fight?

Forget it, you say. There is no way the Republican Party and conservative movement, which have invested so much time and effort in restricting the franchise to serve partisan ends, are going to give up now. But what if there are some good reasons why it might actually be in their interest to do so? Consider:

1. The voting wars are a costly, bureaucratic nightmare.

Conservatives claim to disdain bureaucratic waste and costly litigation—which is exactly what the voting wars have devolved into. Every few days, it seems, brings a new court ruling on a state’s voting laws, often reversing another ruling of just a few days or weeks prior. This back and forth is not just hard to keep track of—it is also causing no end of bureaucratic disarray, which comes at a price to the taxpayer. Take Wisconsin, one of the most contested fronts in the voting wars. In April, a federal district court judge tossed out the state’s new law requiring photo ID at the polls. Last month, a federal appeals court overruled him—but not before absentee ballots had gone out to voters, which meant that the state’s 1,852 municipal election clerks had to start sending out notices to the 11,000 voters who had already requested absentee ballots alerting them that they would need to provide a copy of their photo ID with their returned ballot. The state’s Government Accountability Board also scraped up close to $20,000 from its budget to fund a last-minute public-awareness campaign about the voter ID requirement, with another $400,000 on tap to continue the campaign until Election Day.

But then came yet another reversal—the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday night suspending Wisconsin’s voter ID requirement because it was being implemented too close to the election to allow people without IDs to obtain them. The $400,000 campaign is on hold—but the $20,000 has been spent, and the (now pointless) efforts to reach absentee voters about the photo ID rule have already been made. Is this really how Governor Scott Walker thinks we should be spending taxpayer money?

2. The absence of voter fraud is becoming impossible to deny.

Liberals and civil libertarians have long argued that the threat of voter fraud cited to justify voter ID laws was wildly overstated, and that the only real effect of such laws would be to reduce voting by racial and ethnic minorities and young people who lacked the necessary identification. But there was just enough empirical haze around the laws, and their central claim was sufficiently intuitive (yeah, why shouldn’t we require an ID to vote, if you need one to get on a plane or pick up a prescription?) for many neutral arbiters to go along with the laws, as did the Supreme Court with its 2008 ruling (written by the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens!) upholding the voter ID requirement in Indiana. Increasingly, though, voting restrictions are losing the benefit of such official diffidence as the reality of the new laws starts to sink in. Last year, the highly respected, Reagan-appointed federal appeals court judge Richard Posner declared in a memoir that he had erred in writing the majority opinion upholding the Indiana law, which was in turn affirmed by the Supreme Court. The voter ID requirement, he wrote, was “a type of law now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention.” Earlier this year, the federal district court ruling overturning Wisconsin’s voter ID, by Judge Lynn Adelman, was stinging in its denunciation: “Because virtually no voter impersonation occurs in Wisconsin and it is exceedingly unlikely that voter impersonation will become a problem in Wisconsin in the foreseeable future, this particular state interest has very little weight,” he wrote. “The defendants could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation occurring in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past.”