I know what you’re thinking — “Democrats want to increase their opportunities for voter fraud!” — but c’mon. Would Hillary Clinton endorse something unethical?

Seriously, gooooood politics here:

As you may have heard, Hillary Clinton is already leaning into the ever-simmering battle over voting. Her Democratic allies are preparing to wage a national legal battle against GOP state-level voting restrictions, and she is calling for a national 20-day early voting period.

But now, Clinton is rolling out a third prong in her push for an expansion of voting access: In a speech in Texas that is underway right now, she is calling for universal, automatic voter registration.

Automatic voter registration for citizens has long been championed by voting reformers as a key part of modernizing our voting system. Clinton’s proposal would require the registration of all citizens in every state when they turn 18 years of age, unless they opt out. She is also endorsing the general goal of universal registration for those over 18, without endorsing a specific mechanism to accomplish this.

It’s not quite a mandate since it would allow people to opt out, presumably at no cost. All it does is change the default: From now on, you’re registered unless you say you aren’t instead of vice versa.

I wouldn’t call this a win/win for Hillary so much as a win/win/win/win even though it’ll go nowhere in Congress. Win: If/when GOP candidates come out against her idea, she can accuse them of voter suppression. She’s already doing it, in fact. Watch the clip below from today’s speech. Win: As Greg Sargent notes, the Clinton campaign is terrified that black and Latino voters won’t turn out for her the way they did for Obama. The drop-off among those groups is potentially the margin of victory in a tight race. Pitting herself against the GOP on voting rights is a way to signal to them that she’s the same sort of inheritor of the civil-rights movement as O was. Win: Having the Democratic nominee making noise about this might induce blue states to take it more seriously, which may lead to automatic registration under state law if not federal. Oregon’s already begun experimenting with it, in fact. A raft of state laws wouldn’t help Hillary as much as a federal law would since she’s already destined to win blue states and would merely end up running up the score there by turning more people out. But who knows? If the GOP makes a race of it in, say, Pennsylvania, those extra blue voters might be decisive for her. And win: If automatic voter registration catches on, mandatory voting might be the next Democratic wishlist item. That would give them an enormous advantage considering that registered voters typically trend Democratic. By compelling reluctant or apathetic registered voters to vote, they’d erase the Republican turnout advantage, especially in midterm elections.

The RNC issued this statement in response, although it’s pegged to her support for early voting — another way to give reluctant voters more of a chance to cast a ballot — rather than to automatic registration:

“Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric is misleading and divisive. In reality, the vast majority of Americans – including minority voters – support commonsense measures to prevent voter fraud. Clinton’s shameless attacks ignore the fact her Democrat-led home state of New York does not allow early voting while dozens of Republican-led states do. Her exploitation of this issue only underscores why voters find her dishonest and untrustworthy.” – Orlando Watson, RNC Communications Director for Black Media

True the Vote weighed in too:

“Clinton’s embrace of mandatory or ‘universal’ voter registration may sound above reproach, but the actual means to accomplish such a policy would risk substantial voter dilution for citizens. For such a federal policy to work, Washington voter registrars would be dependent on Social Security, driver license and other social service agencies already proven to commingle citizens and illegal aliens for new records.

“Mrs. Clinton’s condemnation of voter ID laws is an unsurprising development given her demonstrated disdain for transparency in government.

Having illegals casting ballots, which is now easier than ever thanks to Obama’s amnesty, would be a feature for most Democrats, not a bug. No wonder she’s gung ho to get sloppy state agencies registering people from their records en masse. Anyway, the point of all this, as Dan Foster indelicately puts it, is to get “civic idiots” who don’t care enough about the election to fill out a card at the local clerk’s office to the doorstep of the polling place. “If you want an idea of what political discourse looks like when you so dramatically lower the burden of participation that civic idiots elect to join the fray,” says Foster, “I give you the Internet.” Only when we have more habitués of Kardashian message boards voting, my friends, will America truly be free.