Seven Will Speak At Public Hearing On City Election

Seven candidates for a Democratic seat on the Cambridge Election Commission will speak and answer questions at a public hearing Thursday at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church.

The Democratic City Committee, which will nominate three of the seven for the election commission post, is sponsoring the hearing as part of a revised system of selecting the election committee nominees.

The Democratic City Committee is likely to nominate for the first time reform rather than conservative candidates to the election commission.

City Manager John H. Corcoran will select one of the Democratic City Committee's three nominees to serve on the four-member election commission.

The election commission came under attack from students and reform members of the Democratic City Committee last fall when it allegedly denied Harvard and MIT undergraduates the right to register as Cambridge voters.

At registration sessions at Harvard, election commissioners asked undergraduates if they held out-of-state driver's licenses and if they had rooms in their parents' homes in other states in an effort to determine whether they were Cambridge residents.

However, a new state law should eliminate the questioning.

Under the uniform registration act, passed last fall, anyone who fills out an affidavit stating Cambridge address, name, age and place of birth, is entitled to register to vote in Cambridge.

All seven candidates for the election commission have, in the printed statements required under the new selection procedure, said they support the uniform registration act.

But many Cambridge liberals identify incumbent Andrew T. Trodden with the election committee's conservative, allegedly anti-student stand, and Trodden is not likely to get any support from the City Committee's liberal majority.

The election commission has four members, two Democrats and two Republicans. Each member serves a four year term, but the terms are staggered so that one new member joins the commission each year.

The last time the Democratic City Committee nominated candidates for an election commission post, it did not have a liberal majority.

The public hearing--the first of three to be held before the City Committee makes it selections--will be held Thursday night at 8 p.m