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

DATE: SUNDAY, July 30, 1995                   TAG: 9507280059
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: F-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

VOTING

There are 190 million or so citizens eligible to vote in this country, but 70 million of them are not even registered. Typically, only about half the eligible people vote in presidential elections.

About 85 percent of those who are registered, though, have voted in past presidential elections, according to the Census Bureau.

In just the first three months after the National Motor Voter law went into effect in January, making it convenient to register at some government offices and by mail, 2 million Americans registered, according to the National Motor Voter Coalition.

One voter-registration organization estimates that the law will account for as many as 20 million Americans registering before the '96 presidential election. "We're expecting," its executive director told syndicated columnist Carl Rowan, "the largest voter registration increase in American history."

But not in Virginia.

Not if Gov. Allen can help it.

Unfurling the banner of states' rights, the governor has added Virginia to a handful of states challenging the motor-voter law as an unfunded federal mandate, an intrusion into a matter over which states have rightful authority - namely, setting voting rules.

Considering that Virginia voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 1994 to bring state and local registration laws into compliance with the national act, it would seem that Allen is out of step not just with the feds but also with the voters in his own state, whose interests he professes so loudly to hold paramount.

Virginia voters clearly have understood and affirmed the value of increasing the convenience of voter registration. Yet Allen continues to fight this advance, implemented elsewhere in the country, by claiming to defend states' rights. The argument offers thin cover for the real problems that Allen and his party cronies have with motor-voter:

Registration by mail may be open to voter fraud, a legitimate concern that should be further studied by Congress.

Registering at some government offices - such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, from which the law takes its name, and welfare offices - will attract "not the right sort" of voters. In other words, the poor. The poor are less likely to vote Republican.

So what? This law demonstrably and dramatically increases voter registration, and with it the prospect of voter participation. In a nation suffering severe citizen-disaffection, that outcome ought to be welcomed by everyone. To fear and oppose it is unconscionably undemocratic - with a lower-case "d."