The 15th Amendment doesn’t guarantee perfect elections. It guarantees that eligible voters won’t be turned away because of their race. Those two things are not in conflict, but the debate about voter roll maintenance has made them sound like they are.

Ratified Feb. 3, 1870, the amendment’s text is short: The right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. What it doesn’t say is that every voter registration list must be left untouched, or that questioning whether a roll is accurate constitutes racial exclusion. Those interpretations have been imported into the debate without much grounding in the text.