THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 13, 1995 TAG: 9505120014
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
Republicans tend to resist removing obstacles to voting and Democrats tend to favor demolishing them. Republicans accuse Democrats of seeking to swell voter turnout in inner cities and other poverty pockets. Democrats accuse Republicans of seeking to shut out the same voters. There's truth on both sides.
Five years intervened before Democrats overcame Republican blocks to federal legislation requiring states to allow registration for federal elections by mail and at military recruiting centers and state motor-vehicle, welfare and unemployment and disabilities offices.
Republican President Bush vetoed the so-called ``motor-voter bill'' forwarded to him by the 101st Congress. Democrat Bill Clinton signed the one he got from the 102nd, when Democrats were still in the majority. All predictable.
Predictable, too, was Republican Gov. George Allen's recent veto of the Virginia General Assembly bill that would have brought motor-voter registration to the commonwealth. Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the state legislature, a reality that Mr. Allen aspires to change next November when all General Assembly's seats will be up for grabs.
In vetoing the bill, Mr. Allen cited the added costs that compliance with the federal mandate would impose upon Virginia and called the federal law unconstitutional. At his request his fellow Republican and state Attorney General James S. Gilmore III has asked the U.S. District Court in Richmond to permanently prevent enforcement of the act in Virginia.
This caused Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Mark R. Warner to ask: ``(W)hen are (the Republicans) going to stop this pointless waste of the taxpayers' money, the courts' time and the people's patience?''
The fate of democracy will not turn on the outcome of tussles over motor-voter bills. Over two centuries, the voting right has been expanded - frequently with considerable difficulty - to encompass more and more citizens. Now the battle is over ease of registration.
There is a national consensus that (1) voting is a fundamental duty of citizenship, (2) one person's vote ought to equal to another's and (3) big turnouts of voters produce legislative bodies more representative and more democratic than elections determined by small small numbers of voters. Thus, it worries many partisans of constitutional democracy that low U.S. voter turnouts are common; only 50 percent of Americans eligible to vote commonly cast ballots in federal elections.
More than half the states had adopted motor-voter-type registration before Mr. Clinton approved the federal bill. Virginia, which refused to ratify the amendment to the U.S. Constitution extending the voting right to women, almost surely will join the parade sooner or later.
That Republicans are disadvantaged is anything but clear. Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush triumphed in national elections after civil-rights legislation enfranchised Southern blacks. Mr. Allen won the governorship in 1992 by appealing broadly to an enlarged Virginia electorate. And Republicans ended Democrats' four-decade-long reign on Capitol Hill last year even though voter registration nationwide had never been easier.
Mr. Allen says he isn't against making registration easy. In objecting to the federal motor-voter act and the state motor-voter bill, he is expressing his displeasure, perhaps futilely, at dictates from Washington.
His court challenge is consistent with his philosophy of curbing government power and cost. Meanwhile, the experience of recent years suggests that democracy is not harmed, and potentially stands to gain, from making voter registration convenient as well as simple. by CNB