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Have you heard about the federal government’s plan to begin denying large batches of background checks for firearms purchases if any one such background check came back inaccurate?

The system would work this way: People who purchase a gun from a federally-licensed dealer already are required to submit to a background check. Such checks happen every week by the hundreds of thousands. Going forward, if one of those background checks produces an inaccurate result, the entire week’s worth of tests would be void while the federal government addresses why that one test result was inaccurate.

Wait, wait! Lift your hands off the keyboard and step away from your social media post. I got a detail wrong. The system isn’t targeting firearm background checks.

It is targeting election ballots.

The Trump Administration proposed a new system that would require the U.S. Postal Service to begin checking the names and addresses of ballots being delivered to registered voters to determine if that name and address matched federal records of people who are actual U.S. citizens. The specific postal regulations, as reported by multiple entities, included a “zero-percent failure threshold,” which means that if one address failed the test, the Postal Service would send the entire batch of ballots back to the election office from which they came.

The thinking, presumably, is that if one ballot in the batch was wrong, there may be others wrong too. Of course, there presumably are lots of ballots in the batch that are correct. They get rejected for delivery too, potentially leaving eligible voters waiting to receive a ballot with possibly no feasible way to vote.

Such a system makes sense if your greatest worry is that someone gets to take an action — like voting or owning a gun — that they have no right to take. Such a system doesn’t make sense if your greatest worry is that people will be denied one of their rights due to some people trying to exercise a right they don’t have.

I submit that if you were fine with the real example of the Postal Service rejecting batches of ballots, you should also be fine with the made-up example of batches of firearm background checks being rejected. Both would be consequences of a country most worried about people exercising rights they don’t have rather than a country worried about ensuring everyone gets to exercise the rights they do have.

I’m not sure America has decided which country it wants to be in that regard. It should be a priority to figure it out. Regardless, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided this particular Postal Service scheme won’t be used in the upcoming midterm elections.

Everyone should be prepared to address the issue again. Democrats particularly should be prepared, and should be open to taking a different approach. Democrats do themselves harm by simply trotting out the line that voting by noncitizens is rare enough to not warrant any changes. Even if statistics back that position, it is still a bad message. At best it makes it seem like you don’t care enough to try to make the system better. At worse, it makes it seem like you’re secretly fine with noncitizens voting.

My suggestion will drive Democrats crazy: Take a kernel of Donald Trump’s plan and run with it. Create a national system to verify voter eligibility. But here’s the best part: With that system in place, automatically register everyone who is eligible to vote. If voting is truly a right of a U.S. citizen, why do I have to fill out a special form to exercise it? Why can’t I decide on the day of an election that I want to exercise that right? Why, in the case of Kansas law, must I make that decision 21 days ahead of the election? That doesn’t seem like how a right should work.

A key question is whether the federal government can create a reliable voter verification system? Surely it can. It has created a system that within minutes checks whether a person has an event that disqualifies them from buying a firearm.

The federal government has the information to determine voter eligibility for the vast majority of its residents. Coordination between three government agencies would be a great start: 1. The Social Security Administration routinely gets notice from hospitals about new births in the U.S. so that new citizens can get a Social Security card. Getting born in a U.S. hospital is the No. 1 way people become a U.S. citizen, and thus puts them on a path to be an eligible voter when they turn 18. 2. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department knows which immigrants have successfully completed the U.S. citizenship process. 3. The Internal Revenue Service has a very extensive database of where every adult in America lives, accurate to within a few months, since you are required to list your address on your annual tax return.

It would take work to make the system run smoothly and to fill in the gaps. But moving heaven and earth is not required. It seems obvious that we wouldn’t attempt to create such a system a few weeks before an election, but I sense that needs to be said.

Eventually, though, a system could be created, and the payoff could be huge. Think of this: Every U.S. citizen on their 18th birthday would get a card from the Social Security office verifying them as not only an eligible voter, but a registered one. Don’t worry about filling out the paperwork. Just worry about being a good voter.

Of course, such an automatic registration would not be one that put them in any particular political party. If they wanted to register as a Republican or Democrat, for instance, they would need to make their own decision about that and fill out a form. The ranks of voters unaffiliated with a political party would surge.

If I had to guess why such a national voter verification system wouldn’t work, that surge would be No. 1 on my list. Democrats have been more open to automatic voter registration systems than Republicans, but I’m not convinced either party would love the idea of unaffiliated voters growing so significantly.

There’s reason to believe most Americans would like it though. That’s because there’s ample evidence lots of Americans don’t really like either party. A little more than 25% of all U.S. citizens who are 18 and older aren’t registered to vote at all. They seemingly aren’t too enthused about either Republicans or Democrats. Of people who are registered to vote, data from the states estimate 30% to 35% aren’t affiliated with either the Democratic or Republican parties.

Those numbers suggest a majority of American citizens have said “no thanks” to either party. Yet, those two parties essentially decide all of our election laws.

Does that count as election fraud?