Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 13, 1993 TAG: 9306130018
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
One result might have been overcrowding of Virginia hospitals with apoplexy patients.
New federal legislation passed recently requires states to allow voter registration by mail and at Department of Motor Vehicles offices and other agencies, including welfare and disability offices.
Some Virginians who have watched voting schemes, plans, disasters and successes over the years might find it odd that Republicans opposed the bill.
In Virginia almost a half-century ago, the Republicans fought the Democrats for a larger electorate - specifically for repeal of the state's poll tax. The $1.50 tax had to be paid before a Virginian was eligible to vote.
The Byrd machine adored and protected the poll tax because a restricted electorate had kept the machine in power for years.
The tax went back to the turn of the century, when Virginians met in Richmond to write a new constitution to ease the pains of Reconstruction after the Civil War. This was the time of new Jim Crow laws throughout the state and the South - laws that discriminated against free black people. And there was no complaint from Washington.
In June 1901, the delegates came to Richmond to write a new document that would replace the old Underwood Constitution, tainted as it was with the memory of the Confederacy's defeat.
The delegates were frank in their intentions that summer. There was Carter Glass, who would reach national political prominence. When they asked whether the new constitution might be considered discriminatory by the courts, Glass answered:
"Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose; that exactly is why this convention was elected - to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible actions under the federal Constitution with the view to the elimination of every Negro who can be gotten rid of legally, without materially impairing the strength of the white vote."
The writers of the new document didn't entrust it to a vote of the people. They proclaimed it themselves.
The poll tax was part of personal property levies, and its constitutional enactment meant that blacks as well as poor whites, who didn't own property, lost their vote.
Oak saplings were planted ceremoniously in courthouse squares across the state to mark the passage of the 1902 constitution. No jubilant blacks participated in these rites.
Black registration in Richmond dropped from a preconstitution figure of 6,427 to 700.
The saplings would grow into handsome Constitution Oaks and the Byrd machine would flourish because of the restricted electorate.
For years, the only excitement in a governor's race came in the summer, when the Byrd Democrats held primaries to choose their candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.
These nominees were sure to win in November - the primary results being "tantamount to election," as political writers used to say.
But in the 1950s - when Radford Republican Ted Dalton almost beat a Democrat in the race for governor - a new time was coming to Virginia.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court said it was no longer constitutional for states to have separate but equal schools for blacks and whites, and soon the Byrd machine was besieged by the unthinkable: integration of the races in the schools and God knew what else.
The General Assembly toyed with the idea that the state could impose its sovereignty against the power of the federal government. Most schoolboys knew that this idea had died at Appomattox almost a century before.
Byrd counseled "massive resistance" to school desegregation, and the legislature passed laws that caused the closing of integrated schools. But it failed in the end.
"Massive resistance" legislation passed in the late 1950s also was aimed at restricting the number of voters.
This was a "blank paper" registration scheme that eventually had the look of comedy about it.
The law said that registrars could no longer help people to register with printed materials that told the prospective registrants what was expected of them.
Instead, they were supposed to write their age, occupation and other statistics on a blank sheet of paper.
Early results were not favorable to the Byrd people. More blacks were passing the "blank paper" test than whites. The blacks were being tutored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other organizations.
The "blank paper" scheme was not universally liked in Virginia.
Nell Irvin, who made herself into a legend as Roanoke's registrar, said registrants were writing haphazardly all over the pieces of paper.
"How are you going to tell which answer is which?" asked Irvin, a woman with a passion for order and precision.
The law - repealed in 1960 - added to other peculiarities in the way Virginians voted - oddities to out-of-staters and not the kind of thing they expected to find in "The Mother of Presidents."
Among these was the mail ballot. The law at that time allowed weird happenings. There was, for example, the Republican who claimed that deputies in a coalfields county were registering prisoners in the county jail as mail ballot voters.
Without the frequent purging of voter lists now required by law, it was possible to vote dead people and even out-of-staters.
Throughout this often-slapstick time in Virginia voting affairs, the poll tax remained as it had been since 1902.
Now, however, the federal government was interested.
Lt. Gov. Mills Godwin and Attorney General Richard Button went to Washington to testify about the poll tax before a congressional committee.
In a gosh-we-don't-know-what-all-the-fuss-is-about posture, they said the poll tax didn't keep people from voting, but helped orderly registration and added to state revenues.
In 1965, the state came under the federal Voting Rights Act, and the poll tax was gone.
But, to this day, the state has to submit any electoral changes - including new districts for members of boards of supervisors - to the Justice Department for approval.
U.S. House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., said the new federal law will make the voter registration process "user-friendly."
For years, Virginia's process was designed not to be friendly to new users.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB