The motor voter myth - National Voter Registration Act

National Review, Nov 11, 1996 by Karen Saranita

November 5 will be the first national election held under the rules put in place by The National Voter Registration Act (Motor Voter). The NVRA was one of the first laws passed by the Democratic Congress of 1993, with the support of the Clinton Administration. The authors sold it as a way of streamlining the registration process and increasing voter participation.

The debates in Congress led the public to believe that Motor Voter would simply allow people to register to vote at government agencies while conducting other business, such as renewing a driver's license or applying for unemployment or welfare. What could be more benign? After all, the proponents argued, these agencies all require some form of ID from people applying to them. Unfortunately, Motor Voter went well beyond its original concept.

This law has taken all common-sense security measures out of the election process. NVRA mandates that every state allow registration by mail and that "no formal authentication of ID may be required." Furthermore, the act requires every state actively to promote the registration of voters by "independent groups." For years, California's election code has allowed independent groups to conduct voter registration, and has waived ID requirements. As a result, there has been a tremendous amount of fraud in registration and voting here. The National Voter Registration Act will create similar problems, but on a national scale.

A closer look at the independent voter-registration groups reveals that most are motivated by a single issue or by party affiliation. One group registered almost 3,000 new Hispanic voters in California's 39th Assembly District before this year's March primary. There was just one problem: most of the registrations were fraudulent. A random sample of 10 per cent of the new voters revealed phony addresses and large numbers of registrants who admitted they were not U.S. citizens. The registration group had told them that "you don't need to be a citizen to vote any more." The office of California Secretary of State Bill Jones is investigating this registration drive. But, stories like this no longer surprise Californians. In 1994 Mario Aburto Martinez, the assassin of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, was found to have been registered to vote twice by groups like this one.

The Aburto story caught the attention of members of California's congressional delegation, and they asked the Justice Department to investigate the problem of non-citizens voting. Incredibly, the Justice Department replied that "there is no constitutional requirement nor federal law that requires citizenship to vote in federal elections." This ambiguity in federal law has since been corrected by an amendment in the immigration-reform bill that was recently signed into law. Although the law now clearly states that only United States citizens can vote in federal elections, if election officials are forbidden to require ID -- or are discouraged from checking it -- this law is meaningless.

At a June 1994 hearing held by a California State Senate Committee, a Hispanic member of the Los Angeles Police Department testified about her experience as a volunteer with the California-based Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. While working in a Hispanic neighborhood, she observed that she was not registering as many voters as other volunteers were. Talking to others in her group, she discovered that her fellow volunteers were not asking if the potential voters were citizens. When she reported this to her supervisor, she was reprimanded and told that she was not to ask that question; she was instructed to ask only whether the person wished to register to vote.

With funding from companies such as Pacific Bell, GTE, Anheuser Busch, and Taco Bell -- plus the $1 million raised by President Clinton -- Southwest has targeted nine states for registration drives and absentee-ballot campaigns this year. In Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey, Southwest promises to play the "swing vote role at the presidential level and in many congressional races." In California, it plans to "propel key Latino nominees for State Assembly seats to victory, setting the stage for the first Latino Assembly Speaker in California history."

But non-citizens voting is not the only type of fraud that Motor Voter will exacerbate. The Fair Elections Group has documented many cases of the registration of voters whose addresses prove to be vacant lots, and the registration of children, cats, dogs, and deceased people. (California data indicate that dogs tend to be Democrats and cats to be Republicans.) In just the past month, we have received calls from candidates in every part of the country alarmed about sudden shifts in the registration numbers, but at this point, for this election, there is little that can be done.

THE goal of The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 is full registration of every eligible person, and the Fair Elections Group agrees with the concept. Unfortunately, Motor Voter contains no provision for effectively stopping illegal registration and voting. We must wonder if the true wishes of the American people will be reflected in the results of the November election. And while we would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the authors of this law, we must question the motives of those who have made voting the only government-sponsored activity that does not require ID.