California voters move in mysterious ways. On Tuesday night,
they inexplicably voted for a governor that has been plagued by
corruption, and then turned around and rejected a proposition that
would have plagued our voting system with corruption.
Of course the dichotomy makes little sense. But if Californians
weren’t going to dump Gray Davis, they did the next best
thing by defeating Proposition 52, a measure that would have made
the state’s voting system a soft target for voter fraud.
The proposition aimed to increase voter participation by
allowing same-day voter registration. Proponents of the measure
argued its passage would have made the registration process more
convenient, particularly for highly mobile segments of the
population such as college students.
But while Proposition 52’s heart was in the right place,
its mind was somewhere else ““ and this was not lost on
Californians. If passed, the measure would have opened the
floodgates for fraud by accepting easily forgeable forms of
identification for registration (such as utility bills and lease
agreements). And even more problematic, the measure provided no way
of separating fraudulently cast votes from their legitimate
counterparts.
So despite the worthy ideal of instant registration, Proposition
52’s version just wasn’t ready for prime time.
Californians were not willing to trade electoral integrity for
convenience. But more than that, Californians recognized that
lackluster voter turnout has less to do with registration rules and
more to do with apathy.
Indeed a segment of the nation’s population simply has no
interest in exercising its right to vote, regardless of how
convenient voting becomes.
A poll by the Rock the Vote organization indicates that young
voters particularly fit this mold, as a quarter of 18- to
24-year-olds could not identify one of the major presidential
candidates in the 2000 election; 70 percent were dumbfounded when
asked to identify the vice-presidential candidates. Far more
identifiable was the entire cast of “Friends.”
In light of these statistics, a 32 percent turnout in the youth
demographic doesn’t seem so horrendous. A strong case can be
made that the rate is even respectable in the middle of the of the
MTV generation, where a youth culture that puts
“Jackass” at the top of the movie box office appears to
have less and less in common with conventional political
culture.
Apathy goes deeper than voting regulations, and as such it is no
surprise that band-aid measures like Proposition 52 have done
little to spur voter turnout throughout the rest of the country.
Instant-registration laws, motor voter laws, progressive absentee
laws and early voting laws have not resulted in the participation
spike their backers had hoped for.
So unless a novel approach comes along, voter apathy is a
problem that is not going away anytime soon. And as much as
Americans hate the idea of an individuals not taking advantage of
their right to vote, it is not justifiable to take drastic measures
by shortsightedly reforming the voting system.
Yet this is exactly what Proposition 52 attempted to do. Despite
good intentions, the proposition would have done little to increase
voter participation and a great deal to undermine electoral
credibility. Thankfully, California voters were savvy enough to
vote it down.
Eisner writes every Thursday in Viewpoint.