Votes Must Be Fostered, Not Bought : Registration: Inefficient and expensive drives are not the answer. The government, starting at the federal level, must do much more to make participation possible.

Shock, but not surprise, is the appropriate reaction to the latest money scandal in our politics.

California voter registration drives during Sen. Alan Cranston’s 1986 reelection campaign--and then on a much bigger scale during the 1988 presidential contest--were heavily funded by Lincoln Savings & Loan owner Charles H. Keating Jr. Supposedly nonpartisan tax-exempt funds may have been used to seek out more Democrats than Republicans to register.

What is new about this latest stain of scandal on our money-corrupted body politic is that it arises from an effort to make it possible for more citizens to vote. That sounds like a worthy cause. But the next question is: Why is it necessary to spend millions in private money to enfranchise Americans? And beyond that, why is voter registration in this country left to partisan politicians, with their particular temptations to fiddle with the process? In Canada and Britain, for instance, the government enrolls voters door-to-door before elections, and in other democracies citizens become permanently eligible voters when they receive their identity cards.

The United States is the only modern democracy in which the state does almost nothing to make its citizens able to vote. Our government leaves it up to the citizen (and often makes it difficult) to get on the voting rolls. Everywhere else the state plays an active part in enrolling the citizenry.

The result, notoriously, is that the United States, the world’s oldest functioning democracy, has the lowest rate of voter participation of all the developed democracies--and the decline is picking up speed.

In the presidential election of 1988, 183 million citizens were eligible to vote. Of those, 92 million went to the polls. And of the 91 million who did not vote, about 73 million were unregistered. George Bush was thus elected President by slightly more than one-quarter of the eligible voters of the United States. That can hardly be called a representative election.

The effect of this systematic negligence by our government is a “significant crisis of representation, and thus of legitimacy,” in the words of the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham.

Our registration “system” has skewed the electorate in favor of the more prosperous. About 40% of the lower-income groups vote, half the rate of their upper-income fellow-citizens.

This scandalous situation did not always exist. In the latter half of the 19th Century, before we had personal voter registration, the average participation in national elections was nearly 80%. Compare that to the barely 50% that have cast ballots in the last two presidential elections.

There is a myth that the registered, especially from lower-income groups, tend not to vote. The facts refute that. Most studies show that roughly 85% of the registered go to the polls, including those with an eighth-grade education or less.

So we have an enormous distortion in the democratic political system that so proudly we hail. It derives in good part from the mechanics of voter registration--cumbersome, dispersed, different in every jurisdiction and controlled by local politicians who are often not eager to increase their electorates. Hence these ad-hoc, inefficient, expensive registration drives, of which the Cranston effort in California is just the latest example.

For the health of our political institutions there must be major reforms in registration procedures. It has been proved, for example, that allowing people to register when they apply for a driver’s license is cheap, fraud-free and efficient.

The government, starting at the federal level, must do much more to make participation possible.

After years of delay, Congress is at last seriously considering a law that would substantially help.

A bill, passed in 1989 by the House Administration Committee and scheduled for debate early in the upcoming session, would mandate mail registration in every state (26 now permit it); it would restrict purging of voter rolls, and it would make voter registration automatic at all public agencies, including motor-vehicle, welfare and unemployment offices.

Perhaps this cradle of democracy is finally moving toward the enfranchisement of all its citizens by removing the structural obstacles to voting that have lasted so outrageously long.