THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Thursday, March 28, 1996               TAG: 9603280387
SECTION: LOCAL                    PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY LAURIE ASSEO, ASSOCIATED PRESS 
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                         LENGTH: Medium:   52 lines

SUPREME COURT ALLOWS CHALLENGE TO GOP FEE 3 STUDENTS CAN PRESS A CLAIM THAT A $45 FEE AT A STATE GOP CONVENTION WAS A POLL TAX.

Political parties in states covered by the federal Voting Rights Act must get federal approval before charging fees to delegates attending nominating conventions, a divided Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The 5-4 ruling also allowed three Virginia residents to pursue their claim that a $45 fee charged at the 1994 state Republican convention amounted to an illegal poll tax.

The five-justice majority gathered around two opinions. In one, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for himself and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the Voting Rights Act requires federal clearance ``of any change in procedures or practices that may bear on the effectiveness of a vote cast in any primary, special or general election.''

A $45 convention fee qualifies as such a change, Stevens wrote.

The other majority opinion, written by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, said that exempting political parties from federal clearance requirements ``would have opened a loophole in the statute the size of a mountain.''

Members of Congress who enacted the Voting Rights Act knew that some states had sought for years to exclude black citizens from the political process by operating all-white primaries and all-white nominating processes, Breyer said.

His opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and David H. Souter.

Two of the dissenters - Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - accused the court of trampling political parties' freedom of association.

``A freedom of political association that must await the government's favorable response to a `Mother, may I?' is no freedom of political association at all,'' Scalia wrote for the two.

Also dissenting were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

Like other states covered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Virginia must get Justice Department clearance to change its state election laws. Such states must show that voting changes are not racially discriminatory.

Three University of Virginia law students challenged the state GOP's $45 fee for delegates who attended the 1994 state party convention that nominated Oliver North as its candidate for the U.S. Senate. North lost in the general election to Democratic Sen. Chuck Robb. by CNB