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BERKELEY -- Same-day voter registration was headed toward defeat Tuesday night. With two-thirds of the votes counted, Proposition 52 was being voted down by a solid majority of California voters. Updated Nov. 6, 1:05 am
It's not surprising that Prop. 52 is faring as badly as it is. Same-day voter registration is one of those good ideas that no one in Sacramento wants to touch. A liberal millionaire willing to bankroll an initiative campaign is the only reason the idea has made it this far into California's political consciousness, in the form of Proposition 52.
The notion behind same-day voter registration is simple. Registering and then voting is now a two-step process. By allowing people to register and vote on Election Day, the process becomes easier and, the theory is, more people will vote. Six states have same-day voter registration; the largest, Minnesota, has had it since 1973. According to one study, those states have had a three- to six-percent increase in voting since the law was passed.
That same study, authored by Caltech and MIT professors and funded by the New York-based organization Demos, which seeks to liberalize election laws, predicted as much as a nine-percent increase in voter turnout in California if the state were to adopt the same-day approach.
Proposition 52 would allow people to go to their local polling place on Election Day, register and then vote on the spot. It requires new voters to show either valid identification or two pieces of mail proving they live in that precinct. The measure would also stiffen the penalties for voter fraud but not enough to appease some powerful opponents, including the California Republican Party and California Secretary of State Bill Jones.
"The Republican Party opposes it because it doesn't offer a fair system of checks and balances to ensure the validity of registrants on Election Day," said spokeswoman Karen Hanretty.
Opponents' arguments have been persuasive to the state's major newspapers, which one by one have editorialized against the measure. The San Jose Mercury News wrote that the idea is "a great concept but a flawed initiative," and argued that the measure's authors "failed to write in enough safeguards." The Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle cited similar reasons in opposition.
The conventional wisdom is that easing voter registration laws aids Democrats and hurts Republicans. But according to Raymond Wolfinger, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and a specialist in voting behavior, same-day voter registration will help third-party candidates before helping or hindering either major party.
"People are more obsessed with the poor and minorities, and they ignore the really big groups of non-voters, who are kids and people who are transient," Wolfinger said. "Hypothetically, a larger voting population produced by reforms of this kind would look very much like the current voting population." Wolfinger said younger people are more likely to vote for third-party candidates because they have not yet developed strong party loyalties, but that the effect on elections would still be marginal.
Not always. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura's surprise win in 1998 was credited largely to a slew of young people who registered as independents on Election Day.
Attitudes about Proposition 52 are clearly split along party lines, even though it was co-authored by one of the state's most prominent GOP attorneys, and one of its outspoken supporters is Richard Riordan, the former Los Angeles Mayor who lost the Republican gubernatorial primary to Bill Simon earlier this year.
A Field Poll conducted in late October found that nearly half of likely Democratic voters favored the initiative, while likely Republican voters opposed the measure by nearly two to one. Overall, support for the measure, has never reached a majority.
GOP political consultant Allan Hoffenblum laughs when he hears the fraud argument from fellow Republicans. "I've seen a zillion Republican campaigns, and I've always been bemused that every time a new change in election law comes out, Republicans always stand up and yell election fraud," Hoffenblum said. "What this gets down to is that Republicans are concerned that African-Americans and Mexicans are going to be rounded up by big labor and bussed in and shoved in polling places that day."
Part of that suspicion may be fueled by the liberal credentials of the man behind the measure, Rob McKay. An heir to the Taco Bell fortune, McKay is a San Francisco philanthropist who has funded numerous community groups and progressive causes. But Prop. 52 is his first foray into big-league state politics.
Republican political consultant Dave Gilliard, who is heading up the No on Prop. 52 campaign, did not return calls for this article. But his organization says that the devil lies in the details of Prop. 52.
The "No" campaign pointed out that the measure does not require proof of identification from people wishing to register at the polls -- proof of residence will do. Same-day registrants cast "live" ballots, not provisional ones that can be held until election officials can verify whether the voter can indeed vote. And until polling places become linked with the county's voter database, there would be no way to check before the vote was cast whether the person had already voted, leaving the election process open to fraud.
But Lance Olson, a Democratic lawyer who drafted the measure along with Republican lawyer Vigo "Chip" Nielsen, said that opponents' arguments point out flaws in the current system that provide ample opportunity for fraud, and that Proposition 52 actually helps to prevent fraudulent voting.
"Right now, you can register your dog, you can register your cat, you can register felons -- you can do lots of things and there's nothing that can be done about that from a security perspective because it's done secretly, wherever you fill out an affidavit of registration," Olson said. It's true. Anyone can fill out a voter registration postcard now and there is no identification required, nor is ID required to vote at the polls.
Olson said that he and Nielsen considered and then rejected the potential safeguards of provisional ballots for new voters, positive identification and centralized voting. The election officials, Olson said, urged them not to write in provisional ballots because they "slow up the election process tremendously."
The identification and proof of residency requirements were taken directly from the state's rules for people who move before election day, but after the registration deadline has passed. And centralized voting was rejected, Olson said, because "to accomplish the goal, which is to increase voter turnout, voter registration needs to occur where everyone's voting. There is really no reason to have Election Day voter registration if [centralized voting is] the requirement."
Olson rejects the idea that this adds up to a weaker measure that will put the election system in jeopardy of fraud. "We looked at the secretary of state's statistics, and election fraud is usually in connection with paid voter registration programs where there is an incentive to commit fraud," Olson said. "It's just a bogus issue that [opponents] know sounds good."
Same-day voter registration has suffered from malaise in the California legislature on both sides of the political spectrum. The last attempt to create such a system in California was in 1999, when Assemblyman Robert Hertzberg (D-Van Nuys) tried to push it through the legislature. That bill devolved into a compromise law that moved the mail-in registration deadline forward to 15 days before an election, a law that is the object of withering hatred among harried election officials.
Proposition 52 would push the mail-in registration deadline back to 29 days, but that action is still not enough to bring some election officials to put aside their qualms about the measure. Bradley Clark, Alameda County's registrar of voters, said that he had pushed for the measure to include centralized registration on Election Day.
"The person would come to the registrar's office, or a satellite office set up by the registrar that was connected to the database, and they would show ID on election day and we could verify whether they've just voted or if they were getting the correct ballot," Clark said.
Sacramento County Registrar of Voters Ernest Hawkins said that if Proposition 52 passes, his office will make every attempt to verify new registrants, even if the law doesn't require it. "It's an extra cost and effort to do that, but it's in order to preserve the integrity of the process," Hawkins explained.
Neither registrar has taken an official stand on the measure. According to Olson, Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican, came out against Proposition 52 despite repeated attempts by the authors to get his input and his support during the drafting process.
In the end, voters may be loath to fiddle with the election system after the devastating mishaps in the 2000 Florida elections. Or it may have come down to the fact that the voters who have voted on the measure themselves have taken the trouble to register.
"I am discovering that people have two responses [to the measure]," Olson said. "One is a partisan reaction, that conventional wisdom that this helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. The other is more of a personal one. People just say, 'I was able to register in compliance with existing rules, so everyone else should be able to.' I don't think it's because people truly believe that there's going to be some fraudulent corruption of the voting system. It's just not the history of California."