MOTOR-VOTER BILL LEAVES A GOOD DEAL TO BE DESIRED

One of the crown jewels of the first year of the Clinton administration was its much-heralded "Motor Voter Act." This dubious measure may be understood as the ultimate in making voter registration so easy as to cheapen the meaning and currency, as well as the very act, of voting for leaders in a republican form of government. Pardon us if we don't join in the cheering from such as Bekki Cook, Missouri's new Secretary of State.

We have come a long way from the days of our country's founding, when suffrage was limited to property-owning white males. It was only about 70 years ago that women gained the right to vote in America, a reform that was surely overdue. And African-Americans residing in the 11 states of the old Confederacy,, freed from legal slavery by the 13th Amendment 130 years ago, did not achieve full voting rights, in fact, until long overdue passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Generally, this long and uninterrupted trend toward wider voting participation has been all to the good. We also applaud such outreach measures as county clerks' setting up registration at shopping malls and other public places.

Motor Voter, however, takes this trend toward wider suffrage to what are frankly ridiculous lengths. This two-year-old law permits registration for voting while applying for welfare benefits or getting a driver's license. So voting registrars now abound in countless government offices created over the last 60 years by the gigantic federal Nanny State.

Concerns over voter fraud already abound in many states across the country. From California come tales of massive irregularities in its highly mobile population, especially in the densely populated Los Angeles basin. Proven vote fraud charges already overturned a state senate election in Philadelphia last year. And in Maryland, state senator Ellen Sauerbry, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who lost her race by a few thousand out of millions of votes cast, raised substantial objections to the integrity of vote count in last November's election.

There is also the issue of the Motor Voter law's being another unfunded federal mandate. The State of Illinois has challenged the law, as has California Gov. Pete Wilson, who lost in federal court but may appeal. Locally, as a report last Sunday in this newspaper indicated, the law is placing the usual, foreseeable burdens on county clerks, as if they didn't already have enough to do. Look for many of them to have to hire additional workers, at significant cost, to comply with increased workloads.

An editorial in this week's Wall Street Journal, decrying these loosened standards in maintaining reliable voting rolls and clean elections, summarized the case against Motor Voter: "Should `anything goes' continue to be ballot bywords, the nation may wake to a crisis one of these days. Perhaps then it will demand to know who subverted the safeguards in its elections laws."