January 9, 1975

Bounty Hunters Revive Tomb-Stone Voting

If the Democrats in the Ohio legislature have their way this week, Resurrection Day will come early and we will live forever on the voting lists thereafter.

While public attention is focused on the Democratic attempt to revise congressional districts in the last six days of Governor John Gilligan's lame-duck administration, the big prize is door-to-door voter registration.

Should the proposal be sneaked in under the redistricting smoke screen, tomb-stone voting will cease to be a political joke and take its place as standard operating procedure.

The Democrats are pushing the legislation in the firm belief they own the poor, welfare, under-educated and disinterested voters.

This is an astonishing self evaluation, but who can argue with success?

The bill would eliminate the necessity of Ohio voters registering at a record office and then voting once in every two years to keep the registration valid.

Instead, registration would be conducted at your door by bounty hunters paid ten cents per head.  Citizenship and residence requirements would be accepted as claimed, registration would .be permanent and removal from the poll lists would be by death certificate only.

The proposal is so incredibly bad I have difficulty believing the legislators are serious.  Perhaps it is a put-on after all, and the Dems will burst out laughing when the bill is introduced.

If it is not a big ha-ha, and is railroaded through, then republican government is finished - and you can spell that with a small "r" and a capital "R."

We will have arrived to the logical conclusion of popular government - the kind that toppled Greece and Rome.  Under the guise of "democracy" the indigents rule the producers.  When the latter give up, the nation falls.

There is some feeling that we already have reached a condition of popular tyranny, and pro-forma registration of the indigent may be the last nail in our coffin.

Any citizen who values his franchise so lightly that he will not take the trouble to register himself is unfit to vote.  Better he should stay home and not louse up the election.

The last session of the Ohio Assembly enacted legislation permitting voter registration at branch offices and traveling election boards.  This is pandering to luke warm citizenship.  To corner a political nit-wit in his residence and beg him to cast a stupid vote is national suicide.

A dime is insufficient motivation for bounty hunters to do an honest job of canvassing.  The temptation to resurrect the dead each election so their names can be listed on the polls will be irresistible.

How ironic that in the post-Watergate era of super morality we should seek to open the door to licensed fraud!

With monetary rewards missing, partisan greed is certain to take over.  Door-to-door registration will certainly be undertaken by the separate political parties - each anxious to list allies and misplace the registration cards of opponents.

The beauty of curb service, from the Democratic standpoint, is that it can be carried out effectively only in the densely populated, big-city areas traditionally liberal.  The spread out suburbs will receive token registration effort, and the sparsely settled rural areas will be ignored.

Once on the rolls, names would remain virtually forever, for what procedure would monitor the millions of residential moves and individual deaths each year?  Of course we could create another new, patronage filled bureaucracy to keep tabs on us.  However, architects haven't yet figured out how to construct an office building the size of Cleveland.

Voter registration is bound to become a new and potent campaign tool in the hands of unprincipled politicians.

The very haste with which the Democratic leadership is attempting to ram this legislation through is proof-positive of the selfish nature inherent in it.  If it is a good idea for the citizenship of this state it will be just as good next week as this.

No, it is a raw piece of arrogance typical of the John Gilligan administration.  The governor who preached so piously about the evils of Watergate waits anxiously in his state house office to sign a piece of political trickery infinitely more callous than Watergate.

Watergate was an eavesdropping operation by one set of politicians on another.  No one was killed, or injured, or any property stolen, or any honest citizen affected.

The back-room manipulation now going on in Columbus is making a mockery of the legislative process.  And it robs individual citizens of the protection of voting laws.

If we are really as concerned about reforming politics as we say, then we will carefully note the names of those legislators abusing their mandate and throw them out of office with the same vigor we did Nixon.

But, then, maybe it will even out in the end.

When door-to-door registration is followed by door-to-door voting some party-paid registrar may lift our name from a cemetery ledger, and we will live again as an immortal elector - for the other side.

Author: Lindsey Williams