ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
PEOPLE ARE PUTTING pens and voting forms in the hands of people at football games, church, and even in elevators.
There's Kevin Cox, perpetually mad at the Charlottesville, Va., City Council. There are college students carting registration forms to football games. There's the Christian Coalition. And the NAACP.
Just about anyone with a pen, a pack of cards and a passion for politics is hard at work registering new voters in the biggest effort to expand the rolls in two decades.
By the Nov. 5 election - the first national test for the motor voter law - some 20 million Americans will have registered or updated addresses, mostly through the driver's license bureaus that gave the law its name. A breakdown isn't available on how many of those are new registrants, but local registrars say the motor voter law is pushing up their numbers.
"It has increased our rolls considerably," said Diane St.John, Roanoke County's voter registrar.
She said many county residents are using motor voter applications to reregister, but there have been enough new applicants to help push the total number of registered voters from 45,800 in June to 47,708 as of last week.
In Salem, the number of registered voters has grown from 12,405 in June to 12,831.
"Our paperwork load has increased probably 10 times what it was," said Salem Registrar Georgia Firebaugh. At the same time, she noted that the number of people using off-site registration tables has dropped to about a tenth of what normally would occur in a presidential election year.
In Roanoke, the number of registered voters has grown from 41,130 for the June primary to a current 44,918, said City Registrar Shelva Painter.
Virginia's registration figures are in flux, not only from motor voter registrations, but also because of a change that eliminates the four-year purge for nonvoters. In order to keep their records current, registrars this year sent notifications to voters whose addresses on voting lists don't match postal records. The deadline for those voters to make corrections is next week, and nonrespondents may be dropped from registration lists at that point.
Statewide figures show that 77,640 of the 294,534 people who have registered through August of this year obtained motor voter applications from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Another 42,989 people obtained motor voter applications from a public assistance agency, such as the Department of Social Services, the Department of Mental Health or the Department of Health. In-person registrations in Virginia so far this year number 73,028.
The national totals would be even larger if some of the biggest states - including California, Pennsylvania and Illinois - hadn't resisted implementing the law. They fought the federal government in court and lost. Now the effort is up and running in every state that requires advance registration, allowing people to sign up at a variety of state agencies and through the mail.
``As soon as motor voter passed, I was out there,'' said Charlottesville's Cox, a self-described gadfly who suggests that politicians have forgotten the poor and the powerless. ``I was accosting people on the street, in elevators. Wherever I went, I took forms with me.''
The flexibility helped the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People register 59,000 people at 36 branches in the Southeast.
And in Louisiana, the Christian Coalition distributed 100,000 motor voter forms in almost 1,000 churches, hoping to defeat a statewide pro-gambling issue. The issue passed, but the coalition hopes its new voters will support conservative candidates for local, state and national office this fall, said state chairman Sally Campbell of Slidell.
In Columbus, Ohio, students registered 750 voters at last month's Ohio State-Pitt football game. They set up tables at entrances, had messages flashed on the scoreboard and made the rounds at tailgate parties.
``We tried to avoid people who looked rowdy drunk, but there were plenty that weren't,'' said Steve Martin, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan who is organizing efforts in Ohio.
It's part of what could be the largest national student registration drive, said David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which is coordinating the effort. ``What's new and different in 1996 is we have the motor voter law,'' he said. ``It allows you to register wherever you work, wherever you work out or wherever you worship.''
As Virginia's Monday registration deadline approaches, other groups have registration drives under way. On Saturday, for instance, the Coalition of Labor Union Women's Western Virginia chapter will hold a registration drive from 9 a.m. to noon at the office of the American Postal Workers Union at 3113 Williamson Road in Roanoke.
Contrary to many predictions, the early evidence suggests the law is helping Republicans as much as or more than Democrats.
The law requires states to offer registration cards at public assistance agencies, but Republicans who suggested there might be a rush of poor people registering have been proven wrong. About 10 percent of new voters have come from welfare offices, according to a national study by the New York-based voting group Human Serve.
In fact, evidence suggests that the new law is helping Republicans, as voter rolls in the once heavily Democratic South continue their shift toward the GOP.
Nationwide, the National Republican Congressional Committee says, Republican Party enrollment has increased 2.9 percent since 1994 while Democratic registration has dropped 1.2 percent.
Staff writers Christina Nuckols and Jeff Sturgeon contributed to this story.
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