GOP Voter Registration Drive Can Become Bounty Hunt

They walk about downtown San Diego, clipboards in hand, eagerly seeking people out and asking, “Are you registered to vote?” But a civics lesson in participatory democracy this is not--unless you hanker to be a Republican.

Because anyone else who wants to register--as a Democrat, an independent, a Libertarian or anything else--is often told he can’t, even though it is against state law to refuse to provide others with registration materials.

People like Dede Wasserman, who with a partner on Wednesday afternoon was systematically turning away non-Republicans near Horton Plaza, claim they don’t know anything about the law. All she knows, she said, is that she answered a newspaper ad and was hired to find new Republican voters. She is paid $1 for each Republican she registers.

“I can’t waste my time registering Democrats. I don’t get paid for registering Democrats,” an agitated Wasserman said. “They didn’t say anything about that (the state law). I’m just doing what I was told.”

Wasserman is one of the foot soldiers in a drive by the state Republican Party to register 1 million new voters statewide by October. She is also an example of a transformation that has occurred in California politics in the last decade.

Unlike the old-style politics practiced by both Republicans and Democrats, when party volunteers manned voter registration tables, the time-consuming task of registering voters has been turned over to professional companies, which hire people like Wasserman, whose motivation is making a buck--not lofty party ideals.

Invariably in the last few years, these new tactics have led to complaints from citizens throughout the state, turned away by people like Wasserman, because they refused to register as either a Republican or Democrat.

“It’s a regular problem, no doubt about that,” said Caren Daniels, spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office in Sacramento. “Generally, we’ve found that people who are registering people aren’t aware of (the state law).”

Under Section 507 of the California Elections Code, people who register voters must supply voter registration cards to anyone who wants to register, regardless of party affiliation, Daniels said. The penalty for not providing registration cards is a fine of up to $200, she said.

But Daniels said she is unaware of the fine ever having been levied. In most cases, the county’s registrar of voters will contact either the firm hired to collect the registrations or the individual involved and warn them to stop turning people away.

Assessing blame is tenuous at best. For example, Wasserman said she was given a short training session in which she was never informed that turning away non-Republicans is against the law. The emphasis, she said, was on registering Republicans, and only Republicans.

“If they want to register something else, Jerry said to tell them to go someplace else,” Wasserman said.

Jerry is Jerry Mailhot, who works out of an office in Pacific Beach and who hired Wasserman and others responding to his newspaper ad. Mailhot is a subcontractor of American Petition Consultants, a San Diego-based company owned by Tom Bader and Mike Arno that specializes in collecting signatures for statewide initiative campaigns.

American Petition Consultants was hired in the fall by the state Republican Party to register half a million Republican voters.

Of the orders described by Wasserman, Mailhot said, “That’s not true. We have sheets of instructions we give them. Everyone is told not to refuse anybody. In every training session, we specifically tell them not to turn anyone away.

“I’ll admit it may sometimes happen, people get carried away, but what we tell them is to say, ‘We’re working with the Republican Party, and we’d like you to register Republican.’ But we instruct them to give people a card.”

Bader said much the same thing, adding that workers are told not to help non-Republicans fill out the cards. “We don’t have to assist them in doing it, (we) just give them the card,” Bader says.

“We’re not condoning the practice” of turning people away, Bader said. “We don’t want it to happen. Our policy is very explicit on that. I suspect someone is trying to get more signatures to get more money and getting overenthusiastic.”

Joe Irvin, spokesman for the state Republican Party in Burbank, said the party’s contract with the Bader group specifies that the State Elections Code be followed. But he said the code is broken as often by Democrats as it is by Republicans.

“It’s a rat race to do registration,” Irvin said. “But we feel we have a program that respects the integrity of the process.

“This is not something we advocate, but of the thousands of people who are out there registering people, there are some isolated cases” where people are turned away.

“If there are problems, let the Legislature change the law,” he added.

Keith Boyer, assistant San Diego County registrar of voters, said he receives periodic complaints about people hired to register Republicans or Democrats turning other people away, but that none have been lodged recently. “Most of the time, it’s a misunderstanding about what the law says,” Boyer said.

In San Diego County, Republicans lead in the registration battle. As of Jan. 3, there were 487,326 (45%) registered Republicans, compared to 440,573 (41%) Democrats, 121,863 (11%) independents and 25,775 (3%) scattered among several minor parties.

Currently, the registrar of voters office is receiving about 500 registrations a day, according to Maggie Edwards, a registrar official. Most of those, she said, are coming from the Republicans.

Local Democratic Party officials said they were outraged that people hired by Republicans were telling Democrats to register someplace else.

“It’s un-American,” said Mike Aguirre, a San Diego attorney and Democratic Party official. “You don’t have to resort to these tactics to register Republicans. They can go to La Jolla and most likely they are going to register Republicans. You do downtown, and most likely you’ll run into Democrats.”

“This is not a new phenomenon,” he said, noting that local Democrats complained about similar problems in 1984. “There’s no reason in the world they should be doing that.”