Preaching to the Unconverted

"WHY IS everyone so interested in voter registration?" asks longtime civil rights activist James E. Madison. "It all has to do with what I call Plato's theory to defeat apathy: you either provide people with an incentive or you expose a devil-this year we've got both."

Madison, of course, is referring to the Presidency of Ronald Reagan and the candidacy of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. Reagan gets liberals angry; Jackson is actively trying to appeal to a class of voters traditionally underrepresented in the voting population. Together, they are helping spur one of the largest get-out-the-vote efforts in recent history. Not since the succession of marches in the South that prompted the voting Rights Act of 1965 has there been such avid interest in voter registration. While traditional groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of Women Voters remain on the scene, the past three years have seen a proliferation of new groups and strategies-from both ends of the political spectrum-hoping to affect the 1984 election by registering voters.

Today, a myriad of both partisan and nonpartisan groups are organizing voter registration drives targeted at a variety of specific audiences. The Southwest Voter Education Project is aiming to register Hispanic voters in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Project VOTE wants to reach people in cheese and unemployment lines, and Frontlash is gunning for voting-age youths. Meanwhile, from the right side of the spectrum, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is putting together a booklet to encourage businessmen to vote, and the Republican National Committee is making special efforts to enlist members of the armed forces and evangelicals.

A lot of this effort is utilitarian. Concern even about the long-range effects of low voter turnout on a democratic society notwithstanding, both political parties are keenly aware of the impact a rise in the amount of voters could have on the election.

In 1980, 53.9 percent of eligible voters-or about 87 million people-voted in the November general election. Walter F.Mondale's campaign manager. James Johnson, has told reporters that the Democrats should be able to reverse their 1980 Josses if they can bring that percentage up to 57 or 58. Especially important in such calculations are a ream of electoral votes. Thirteen states that Reagan carried in 1980 have unregistered voters exceeding Reagan's respective margins of victory there, including Massachusetts, New York, and Mississippi.

Just focusing on unregistered Black voters gives an indication of the untapped power at the hands of the Parties. Nine in 10 Blacks vote for Democrats and that figure may well be even worse for Republicans in 1984, since Reagan's approval rating with Blacks has sunk below 10 percent. In Massachusetts alone, where Reagan carried the state by less than 3000 votes, drawing some of the more than 60,000 unregistered Blacks to the polls could make a difference. "In mary of these cases, had one third of the unregistered Blacks voted, Mr. Reagan would not have been elected President," says Madison. "The hands that once picked cotton can now pick the President-and they know that."

That's why Democratic bigwigs know that Jackson's candidacy is bound to help the party in the long run; his efforts at registering voters in the South will prove handy in November though his snipes at Mondale now cause friction. And this is why the Democratic National Committee-as well as a smattering of other, liberal groups-is channeling $2 million into community based voter registration efforts.

But voter registration is not the sole province of the Democrats and liberals. Although they face tougher going, the Republicans are also going after new voters. Together, the Reagan Bush reelection camp and the Republican National Committee are planning to spend $10 million in the hopes of registering between two and two and a half million new voters. "There are 53 million unregistered votes out there, and it's a good bet they're not all Black," says campaign aide John Buckley.

But there's no denying the registration game is trickier for the GOP. Most polls, for instance, show that two-thirds of newly registered voters would support the Democrats-a statistic that reflects the deep disaffection that several minority groups have for Reagan. Voter registration could be the campaign fiasco that leaves egg all over the collective GOP face, which is why Republicans are spending so much money for relatively few votes. But they are treading carefully. The Republicans and their allies especially the Chamber of Commerce and the Moral Majority-want to tap only those constituencies they are after-in particular businessmen, young professionals, people who live near army bases, and evangelical Christians; otherwise, they could awaken a sleeping giant.

AMBITIOUS INTENTIONS not-withstanding, however, both parties face a number of stumbling blacks in their registration efforts. These are both struc- tural and attitudinal. In the Southwest, for instance, racial gerrymandering--that is, setting district boundaries which divide minority blocs--polarizes voters, critics charge. "In these areas, if you're in the minority, you can't win, so [the attitude is:] why vote?" says William C. Velasquez, director of the Southwest Voter Education Project.

Even when the desire to vote is strong, structural barriers to voter registration persist in a host of states. "The states impose maximum impediments on registration," former President Jimmy Carter said last fall at a symposium on voter registration sponsored by Harvard and ABC News. "It is almost impossible to figure out how, in a convenient way, to become registered," he said. Carter's lament is borne out by the proliferation of rules and regulations in some states that make it downright difficult to get to the voting booth. Despite the provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to eliminate discriminatory registration rules, many states continue to prohibit postcard and door-to-door registration--a move which disproportionately affects poor and minority voters. Some states still require voters to register and both municipal and county seats; in Mississippi, citizens may have to travel 70 miles to register, and in North Carolina's Graham County, a citizen can only register on Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoons.

Conservative groups also have to deal with the proliferation of complicated registration rules from state to state. The book put out by the Chamber of Commerce, for instance, is intended "to lead business people through the morass of voter registration laws," says John A. Kochvar, director of the Chamber's Political Action Committee. The Chamber has targeted managerial and corporate employees, whose voting power, they believe, is diluted by their high mobility and frequent travel on election days.

Efforts to loosen the rules concerning voter registration have not met with much success in recent years, despite the energy focused in the problem. "The decision-makers in the legislature are unwilling to open up the process because of political concerns," says David Sullivan, a Cambridge city councilor and Massachusetts election official. "They don't want to be responsible to a larger constituency."

But the registration groups--especially on the Left--are beginning to come up with some innovative ways of adding names to the voter rolls. Project VOTE, for instance, is an organization that tries to enlist low-income voters by setting up registration tables in food stamp and unemployment lines and housing projects. "We tell them that the social programs--for which they are in line--being cut affect poor people and minorities, and that their failure to register and vote has elected those responsible," says Alan Raby, an official with the program. Efforts like these, moreover, are being helped no end by the Jackson candidacy. "You've never had a Presidential candidate who has put this kind of emphasis on registration," says Madison, who works for the NAACP. "He's forcing a lot of politicians to do registration just to compete with him.