Accord Reached on Voter Registration Measure

Republican and Democratic negotiators reached agreement Tuesday on legislation designed to simplify voter registration and clear up legal problems that could keep as many as 300,000 newly registered voters from casting ballots in the June 3 election.

Agreement came when Democratic members of a Senate-Assembly conference committee gave in to Republican demands for removal of all provisions of the bill that did not have a direct bearing on the election.

As amended, the bill deals exclusively with the problem of voters who, through haste, confusion or oversight, submitted incomplete registration cards, failing to list such items as party affiliation or their middle name or initial.

Satisfied With Compromise

‘We don’t want anyone to lose their right to vote in the primary election because they left off a middle initial,” said the author, Assemblyman Johan Klehs (D-San Leandro), who pronounced himself satisfied with the compromise.

Klehs, chairman of the Assembly Elections and Reapportionment Committee, said he planned to introduce portions deleted from the bill in separate legislation. These included details governing the distribution and tracking of voter affidavits of registration.

Minority Assembly Republicans, who last Thursday blocked passage of the Senate-approved bill when it came up for a vote in the lower house, had expressed alarm that such provisions would interfere with GOP voter registration drives.

“We don’t have a problem with the bill now,” said Assemblyman John R. Lewis of Orange, who represented Assembly Republicans on the committee.

Democrats need GOP support because the bill is being rushed through the Legislature with the aim to enact it in time for the primary. Such urgency bills require a two-thirds majority in each house for approval.

In its amended form, the bill deals with the immediate problem of vast numbers of voters who filed incomplete forms when they registered--as many as 300,000 between Feb. 20 and May 5 alone, according to rough estimates by election officials.

For years, these incomplete forms had not been a problem. County election officials, operating under guidelines established by Secretary of State March Fong Eu after the state switched to the postcard registration system in the late 1970s, simply presumed that if a person did not register with a middle name or initial, it meant he or she didn’t have one.

On Feb. 20, however, Eu ordered local officials to begin rejecting incomplete affidavits, citing legal opinions by the attorney general and the Legislature’s lawyer saying that state election law made no provisions for such presumptions.

The Klehs bill, introduced at Eu’s request, would for the first time create such presumptions in the Elections Code. Klehs said he hoped the bill would be put to a final vote in both houses this week.