
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 9, 1995                   TAG: 9505110043
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ALLEN'S THREESOME OF BAD DECISIONS

GOV. GEORGE Allen had an all-purpose ``gotcha'' line running against former Attorney General Mary Sue Terry in 1993: The Democrat, he and other Republicans charged, had been ``asleep at the switch'' - on crime-and-punishment issues, on the federal retirees' pension dispute, so on and so forth.

Virginians might wonder now if Gov. Allen was asleep at the switch in the fall of 1994.

That was when a proposed constitutional amendment dealing with the so-called motor-voter law was put to public referendum - and overwhelmingly approved by Virginia voters. Maybe we slept through it, but darned if we can recall the governor sounding any alarms as to why right-thinking voters should defeat the proposal.

If it represented a dreadful encroachment of federal authority on states' rights, was (gasp!) an unfunded federal mandate that Virginia could ill afford, and threatened us with voter fraud from the mountains to the seashore, the governor might have roused himself to warn us back then.

What we remember hearing, at least from others out of Richmond, was that the amendment was necessary to bring state and local registration laws into compliance with the new National Voter Registration Act passed by Congress in 1993, and to save the state the unnecessary expense of having to keep separate lists of voters - one for federal elections, another for state and local contests. These arguments have the interesting merit of being true.

Yet the governor now has vetoed state legislation implementing in Virginia the motor-voter concept - so named because it would allow citizens to register to vote at Department of Motor Vehicle offices. (It also would permit registration at a select few other government offices, and by mail.)

To be sure, the state has filed suit seeking to overturn the federal voter-registration law. But with this veto, Allen, our law-and-order governor, has essentially said there's no need to wait for a federal court ruling, that it's OK for Virginians to defy a law of the land. It seems strange to muster massive resistance to a referendum-approved law simply making registration more convenient for those who might like to take part in the democratic process.

Meanwhile, we also have to wonder if Allen was asleep at the switch when he signed a bill dealing with distribution of child pornography over computer networks. The attorney general says he'll prosecute selectively, so as to avoid punishing unwitting transmitters of pornography. But the point is to write such provisions into the law in the first place.

Indeed, the measure is burdened with huge constitutional flaws, which Allen as much as acknowledged last month when he proposed amendments to bring it more into line with the First Amendment and other protections. State lawmakers, to their discredit, refused to approve the amendments. Last week, Gov. Rip van Winkle signed the bill anyway.

Of course, no one can accuse him of snoozing when he signed a measure making it easier to carry concealed weapons. Oh, yes, he was wide awake - wide awake to the clout of the gun lobby in Virginia.

In all three of these matters, Allen made the wrong choice. We wonder if, over such bad decisions, he loses even a wink of sleep.

by CNB