Perhaps you're now thinking to yourself: Hey, this McCain guy's pretty interesting. Maybe I should vote.

Forget about it. Even though the Massachusetts presidential primary isn't until next month, the deadline for registering to vote was last Wednesday. No matter what you say, no matter how much you want to vote, you can't if you're not registered. And there's a good reason for it.

We don't want people like you to vote.

Let me explain. Supposedly everyone alive and over the age of 17 can  vote. This idea is called universal suffrage.

It's an idea in which a lot of people don't believe.

To be sure, we used to be much more open in expressing our opposition to universal suffrage. We used to require that you own property to vote. A black man who wanted to vote could do so, but his vote only counted for three-fifths of a white man's vote. Up until 80 years ago, women couldn't vote at all. And as recently as the 1950s, states continued to impose literacy requirements.

Now we make people register to vote.

It's a more subtle method of separating the wheat voters from the chaff voters, of making sure that those people who show up at the polls have a stake in the results.

Boston politics has long thrived on the skewed voting that occurs when you make people register. In general, those who register tend to be people who have lived in the city for a while, who have a stake in their community. Those who don't register tend to be newcomers or college students. Many of them are here for only a short while and have little intention of making Boston a long-term home.

What's wrong with that, you say? Shouldn't people who are committed to their neighborhoods have more of a say in what goes on in their neighborhoods? Why should virtual passers-by have the same voice as those who spend their lives in Boston?

Now you're beginning to understand why voting requirements such as property ownership were so popular. Of course, it's not politically correct to advocate those, so we have registration requirements instead. The rationale we use is different as well. We have voter registration, we say, to reduce fraud.

Sure. As if we've ever cared about fraud. There are graveyards in Boston that have a higher turnout than some precincts. On Election Day, ``Vote early and often'' replaces ``Have a nice day'' as the greeting of choice. To buy a beer in this state you have to show a driver's license; to vote, all you need is your signature. True, one signs the voter registration form under penalties of perjury. Perjury. Now that's scary. Just ask Bill Clinton. How many jail cells around the state do you think are filled with fraudulent would-be voters?

So now that we've finally settled on the notion that we don't want everyone to vote, Boston City Councilor Michael Ross has just floated a proposal to allow voters to register the day they vote.

Ross is new and obviously doesn't understand. We may complain about lack of voter participation, but in truth, we don't want new voters. Ross, in his naivete, even addresses the fraud issue head-on, believing that this is a real concern. He argues that, if fraud ever was an issue, it isn't one any more. Boston, like every other town and city in Massachusetts, keeps its voter list on an electronic database. All of those voter lists are connected to one another through the secretary of state's office. It should be easy to track Election Day registration and voting by simply putting in a terminal at every polling location.

Ross, of course, is right. After all, if New Hampshire and Maine can do it - both states let voters register and vote on Election Day itself - so too can Massachusetts. But think of the consequences!

In the most recent city elections a bunch of new voters, energized by two open and hotly contested district council seats, somehow slipped past the screening system and actually voted. The result? Dapper O'Neill lost! If we really opened up the voting process, if we really made it easy for every resident, new and old, apathetic or engaged, to vote, political heads might roll.

Who's next? Jim Kelly? Charles Yancey? Oh, the horrors!

Tom Keane, formerly a Boston city councilor, writes regularly for the Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.