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Show )ou$t of Eepreaentattoeg Our present voter registration system allows officials to effectively screen voters and purge the rolls of non-existent ones before the fraud can occur. But as I have outlined, there is a preponderance of evidence " that this new proposal would do the opposite and invite whole new fraudulent schemes for dishonest politicians. We must defeat the bill if we are to keep elections in this country free and honest and my efforts will continue toward that end. One of the big three reform proposals thrust upon Congress by the Carter Administration is instant voter registration. It is embodied in II. R. 5400, the Universal Voter Registration Act of 1977. Along with public financing of Congressional campaigns and the recently approved Hatch Act Revisions, instant registration will cost millions of tax dollars and open the door to wholesale fraud in our elections, disrupting rather than reforming the system. These proposals are billed as simplification of the election process to increase public participation. That's a worthy cause and I encourage en-courage the concept, but going about it in this 'manner would in fact accomplish the opposite -- more control by big labor and special interest in-terest groups and less by individuals. The way instant registration works is that anyone with some form of Even if it could be done, -this bill mandates unrealistically harsh criminal penalties for voting fraud. Can you imagine a judge or jury sending someone to jail for five years for improper voting, especially when many others did the same thing but didn't get caught? Many claim the success of same-day registration in Wisconsin and Minnesota shows that this abuse would not occur. But Minnesota and Wisconsin, two rural northern states with good overall voting records, are not Chicago, New York and Boston -- big cities with all too familiar political machines. Opposition to the proposal is not restricted to any one faction. Thirty of the fifty Secretaries of State in America, including Utah's David S. Monson, have adamantly opposed relaxing voter registration requirements. Chicago election officials (all Democrats) recently told a Congressional committee that if adopted, this law would put Chicago "back into the dark ages" as far as honest elections are concerned. Even the U. S. Justice Department criticized the plan, the head of the Election Unit of the Criminal Division saying, "I oppose the concept embodied em-bodied in H. R. 5400 as a dangerous relaxation of what precious few safeguards precently exist against abuse of the franchise." fran-chise." I have made my opposition official in the form of a letter to House Speaker Thomas O'Neill calling for an investigation in-vestigation of the bill's fraud potential. identification can show up at the voting booth on election day and cast a ballot. It doesn't take much imagination to see the possibilities. Large numbers ' of people could be brought into a precinct or community, com-munity, claim it is their intent to live there permanently, per-manently, then cast enough votes to impose an unwanted bond issue on local voters, or dilute the impact of a local minority voting bloc. The easy availability of false ID cards is another problem. Therefore simply requiring a form of identification iden-tification is no deterent at all. It would be virtually impossible to check out every suspicious individual or group. |