New York, for example, doesn’t do voter suppression, but it’s one of many states where voting can be truly inconvenient. We New Yorkers can’t register on the same day we vote. We can only get an absentee ballot for a prescribed set of reasons. (New Yorkers can get permanent absentee status, but only if we are registered as having a permanent illness or physical disability). We don’t get Election Day off from work. Until the law was changed this year, we couldn’t vote before Election Day and were automatically de-registered if we moved. And polling places in many parts of the state opened at noon.

We tend not to think of this as bad behavior, because the restrictions aren’t openly racist. (Except that the whole “let’s vote on a weekday and not give hourly workers time off” is a way to make it hard for low-wage workers to vote.) New York’s rules never struck me as problematic before, because it’s how everyone voted when I was growing up.

But it isn’t how everyone votes now.

In Washington, Oregon and Colorado — and any minute now, Hawaii, where the governor is about to sign a new law — there are no longer traditional polling places. (California is also rolling this out county by county; by the 2020 election, half of voters will get a ballot at home.) The states mail ballots in bar-coded envelopes to every registered voter several weeks before the election. It’s automatic; the voter doesn’t need to request it.

Those states are blue or purple, but home voting is also growing in red states. Voters in 28 of Utah’s 29 counties automatically get ballots at home. Nebraska and North Dakota also use it, to varying degrees. And nearly half of states allow certain elections to be conducted entirely by home voting. It allows voters to mark their ballots at their leisure and either mail it back or drop it in a ballot drop box. (Most use a drop box, which is why it’s not entirely accurate to call it vote-by-mail.) Some states allow voters to track the progress of their ballots electronically.

If you’d prefer to vote the old-fashioned way, you can still go to a staffed voter center in a central location — for example, the township hall. There any voter can cast a ballot, regardless of geography. “We’ll send it to the right place,” said Kim Wyman, Washington’s secretary of state. And people with disabilities who can’t vote with a paper ballot have other options.