Voters to Consider Signups at the Polls

Californians this November will weigh one of the most significant changes to state elections in years: whether to allow voters to walk into a neighborhood polling place, register to vote and cast a ballot all at once on election day.

The brainchild of businessman Rob McKay, an heir to a Taco Bell fortune, Proposition 52 would make California the seventh state to allow same-day voter registration. Noting that voter participation in California has been declining steadily for three decades, supporters say the proposal is an overdue step to make voting more convenient.

Opponents say it could open the way for widespread voter fraud.

Turnout in California, which requires voters to be registered 15 days before an election, has ranked in the bottom six of the 50 states during the last two presidential elections.

It hit a historic low in March, when only one-third of registered voters--or one-fourth of those eligible to vote--cast ballots. By contrast, in Minnesota, which has had election-day registration since 1973, 69% of the voting-age population cast ballots in 2000, the highest turnout in the country.

A recent study by political science professors at Caltech and MIT found that, in states that allow people to register at the polls, nearly nine out of 10 people of voting age were registered in 2000; elsewhere, the average was three out of four. Two-thirds of the voting-age public cast ballots in states with same-day registration in 2000, compared with just half everywhere else.

The study concluded that California voter participation could jump by as much as 9% with election-day registration, because the state has an exceptionally young and mobile electorate.

“It’s just not acceptable in a democracy to have this unhealthy a level of voter participation,” said McKay, who describes himself as a liberal and who helped bankroll San Francisco’s living wage campaign and the Los Angeles bus riders union. McKay sees his initiative as a way to bolster civic participation. “If you vote, you are a heck of a lot more likely to go to your kid’s school board meeting.”

But opponents--who include California’s top elections official, Secretary of State Bill Jones--fear that the state’s already strapped poll workers would be over-burdened with the additional responsibility of verifying the identifications of an unpredictable number of newcomers. That, foes assert, could threaten the very integrity of the state’s elections.

“I don’t want people writing about California what they are writing about Florida,” Jones said, although Florida, with widely publicized polling difficulties in two recent elections, does not have election-day registration. “If you are going to bring thousands of new people to polling places who aren’t registered to vote, you are going to place a lot of pressure on those polling places.”

Who Benefits?

Traditionally in California, efforts to boost voter turnout have been widely presumed to benefit Democrats, and the California Democratic Party is a supporter of election-day registration. But the California Republican Party has not officially opposed the measure, and GOP politicians have been careful to knock down any perception that they are against increasing the voter rolls.

Proposition 52 is headed for a close vote, early polls suggest. Here is how it would work:

* People qualified to vote in California would be able to register at their local precincts the day of an election, as long as they could provide proof they lived in the area. Voters registered elsewhere because they had lived in another part of the state could also reregister on the spot, if they could prove their new place of residence.

For proof, a prospective voter would need to show only a current California driver’s license or a state identification card. Two other forms of identification could be used as an alternative, from a list including military IDs, property tax records, credit card bills, income tax returns, student IDs or ordinary mail addressed to the voter’s new residence. People could even cast ballots without identification if they obtained sworn written statements from people who vouched for them in the presence of poll workers.

* Every polling place in the state would have a separate area dedicated to processing election-day registration, and at least one precinct worker would be trained to do the ID checks. Ballots by newly registered voters would be counted along with the rest, but poll workers would prepare a list of them, and elections officials would check the list against other records to make sure no one had voted twice.

* If election officials suspected someone of committing voter fraud, they would have to submit a complaint to local prosecutors. Violators would be subject to jail time and fines of as much as $20,000. If two or more people engaged in a wider conspiracy, they would face prison terms as long as five years.

“For someone to engage in voting fraud, the downside is enormous” under Proposition 52, said Dan Tokaji, chairman of California Common Cause, a political watchdog group that endorsed the measure. “It will be a great thing for California democracy. It will increase registration and participation, especially among groups that have not been a big part of the process: younger people and people of color.”

Though supporters note the ID requirement is stricter than is now applied for registration and voting, opponents call it dangerously flimsy. They worry that fraud would become prevalent--particularly in small city and school board races where a few dozen votes can reverse an outcome. And they contend election officials would be too overwhelmed to catch fraud.

“There are a lot of us who think our current system is not secure enough. This goes in the opposite direction and makes it worse,” said Assemblyman Ken Maddox (R-Garden Grove), co-chairman of the opposition campaign. “The only thing needed to register on the day of an election is a name and a few pieces of junk mail.”

California legislators, notably former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), tried in recent years to pass same-day registration laws to stimulate the state’s electorate. But the efforts failed, amid opposition from election officials who predicted disaster and campaign consultants who grumbled that election-day registration would make it harder to determine who was likely to vote, and thus, who should be targeted for political advertising.

The unwillingness of state leaders to act led McKay to try to do it himself.

Though he grew up, amid great affluence, in a politically conservative household in Palos Verdes, McKay, 38, has said he developed liberal views and a passion for social justice. He has decided to use his family’s fast-food fortune to take same-day registration directly to voters, he said, because he is convinced that, over time, it would accomplish much more than just getting people to the polls.

McKay’s father, Robert McKay Sr., was the architect who designed the distinctive Spanish-style Taco Bell buildings for the franchise founder, Glen Bell. The elder McKay later became Taco Bell’s president, and helped turn the small Southern California company into a national chain. He then parlayed his taco profits into great wealth with sagacious investments in a number of fledgling firms, including U.S. Robotics.

The McKay family is reportedly now worth several hundred million dollars. The younger McKay serves as managing partner of McKay Investment Group, its venture capital firm. But he is better known for his philanthropy as director of the McKay Foundation, a San Francisco organization that helped grass-roots groups in South-Central Los Angeles begin to rebuild after the 1992 riots.

Rich White Men

It has become a California cliche for rich white men to step into the political arena and spend millions on initiatives--often as a way to publicize themselves and further their aspirations for statewide office.

“This is not a vehicle for Rob McKay to introduce himself to the voters,” McKay said, adding that he would “most likely not” ever become a candidate.

McKay has spent $2 million to date on the initiative, and stated matter-of-factly during an interview that he planned to spend at least $3 million to $5 million more. He has assembled a campaign team featuring leading Republican and Democratic lawyers and consultants, and secured endorsements across the partisan divide, from former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, a Republican, to former Democratic Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa. Gov. Gray Davis has not taken a position on the measure.

“This is an act of patriotism for me, to support this,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca. Opponents have also lined up a bipartisan array of endorsements, weighted more heavy with local elections officials and prosecutors, including Sacramento County Dist. Atty. Jan Scully and Riverside County Registrar-Recorder Michelle Townsend. But they have so far failed to raise money to counter McKay, who is planning television advertising.

McKay and others note that there is no evidence that election fraud is more common in the states with election-day registration: Minnesota, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Wyoming. They also point out that, counter to claims that same-day registration would bring out liberal Democrats, neither party has received an advantage in those states.

Nonetheless, Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer described her state’s record with election-day registration as mixed. It has undoubtedly led to higher turnouts: 18% of those who voted in the 1998 governor’s race, which was won by former professional wrestler and Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura, registered on election day. But she said it has also led to long lines and confusion at polling places.

She suspects it is also leading to more voter fraud, and plans to focus soon on increasing safeguards to minimize the problem.

“We do have documented cases of fraud in every county every year. Convictions, however, are hard to come by,” Kiffmeyer said. “You need to have integrity with your access. It is just as important, and I highly recommend that California be careful about maintaining its integrity.”