[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 108 (Tuesday, August 4, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1540-E1541]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               BIPARTISAN CAMPAIGN INTEGRITY ACT OF 1997

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                           HON. SAM GEJDENSON

                             of connecticut

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, August 3, 1998

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the State of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2183) to 
     amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to reform the 
     financing of campaigns for elections for Federal office, and 
     for other purposes:

  Mr. GEJDENSON. Mr. Chairman, on July 20, 1998, Mr. Goodlatte of 
Virginia offered an amendment to the Shays-Meeham campaign finance 
reform substitute that proposed repealing important provisions of the 
1993 National Voter Registration Act. Fortunately, this ill-considered 
amendment to gut what has become known as the ``Motor Voter law'' was 
defeated. In his remarks supporting Mr. Goodlatte's amendment, Mr. 
DeLay of Texas cited Dr. Walter Dean Burnham, a professor of Government 
at the University of Texas at Austin and a nationally recognized expert 
on the history of American campaigns and elections. On page H5941, Mr. 
DeLay states: ``Because of the lack of fraud provisions in the Motor 
Voter law, `We have the modern world's sloppiest electoral systems,' 
according to political scientist Walter Dean Burnham.''
  In a letter to the Committee on House Oversight, Dr. Burnham writes 
that Mr. DeLay misquoted him and misrepresented the substance of his 
research on voting. His letter follows:

         The University of Texas at Austin, Department of 
           Government,
                                        Austin, TX, July 27, 1998.
     Dr. Keith Abouchar
     Committee on Oversight, Democratic Staff, House of 
         Representatives, Longworth House Office Bldg., 
         Washington, DC.
       Dear Keith: Thanks very much for the fax of July 21 and the 
     enclosed CR remarks on the Goodlatte Amendment.
       It will probably not surprise you to learn that I was 
     grossly misquoted by Rep. DeLay. Some years ago, I was 
     indiscreet enough to respond to a phone inquiry from some 
     writer

[[Page E1541]]

     for the Readers' Digest who, it turned out, was a strong 
     opponent of the Motor Voter Act--which of course I warmly 
     supported. The slant given on my views there was bad enough, 
     but I have to regard myself as an inadvertent unindicted co-
     conspirator in that case.
       My major theme was--and is--that for a country which prides 
     itself on its democratic institutions the United States (or, 
     more precisely, the states and localities chiefly responsible 
     for election laws) is remarkable for long adhering to the 
     view, implicitly, that voting is a privilege requiring 
     justification before some official rather than, as elsewhere 
     in the Western world, a right which the state does its very 
     best to protect. The theoretical issues here are thoroughly 
     canvassed in any essay on a case from Texas involving that 
     state's 1966 voter-registration act that I produced in the 
     1971 Washington University Law Quarterly.
       The sloppiness in election administration to which I refer 
     in particular has nothing to do with the Motor Voter Act as 
     DeLay sloppily claims: it seems endemic in a great many 
     locations (though by no means all), and it goes back a long 
     way. We will leave aside cases of outright swamping of the 
     process by massive corruption, of the sort that prompted a 
     Republican Senate to refuse to seat two apparent Republican 
     winners that year (Frank Smith of Illinois, William S. Vare 
     of Pennsylvania). One sees examples of it most clearly, 
     perhaps, when contested elections develop--such as the 1950 
     and 1952 gubernatorial races in Michigan; or the 1960 House 
     race in the 5th Indiana, where the Democrat was finally 
     declared the winner by a margin of 99 votes out of 214.5 
     thousand votes cast (the 1996 Sanchez-Dornan election in the 
     46th California has its precedents!); and some surveys of 
     Texas elections as well, as e.g., in 1968). From this record, 
     one derives the general sense not that excessive corruption 
     was in play (as in the 1926 Senate cases), but rather that 
     administrative incompetence on a scale which W. Europe or 
     Canada would not tolerate (and do not have) makes the results 
     of a great many American elections mere approximations to the 
     actual votes cast for the various candidates. Various 
     misfires of punch-card and machine systems for casting votes 
     in such places as Detroit and Cleveland in the 1970s merely 
     reinforce this impression.
       One obvious solution to this problem, so far as such 
     efforts to ameliorate the turnout-depression caused by 
     personal registration systems as the Motor Voter of 1993 are 
     concerned, would be to say that you simply can't get there 
     from here and to urge the view that it multiplies the 
     occasions for unqualified people to cast ballots and should 
     be repealed. Naturally, conservatives favor this, for they 
     have systematically used the corruption/fraud argument for 
     decades to defeat any efforts to make it easier for people to 
     have access to the polls. One may note the roll-call votes on 
     passage of this act as a recent example of this. Obviously, 
     believing as I do that the European-British-Canadian 
     arrangements for state enrollment of eligible voters 
     correspond to my belief that voting is a right and not a 
     privilege, if I had my way I would declare personal 
     registration ipso facto as unconstitutional; but no Supreme 
     Court I can imagine in my foreseeable future is likely to 
     agree with me.
       The alternative solution, it seems to me, is to invest in 
     developing an election-administration bureaucracy which can 
     competently and speedily count the votes cast and publish the 
     results. This does not resolve the personal-registration 
     problem, but if enforceably carried out should minimize the 
     extent of sloppiness that evidently now exists.
       That, and that alone, is my position. A nation will choose 
     to make investments where the organized will to do so exists. 
     So far as elections are concerned, it has to be said that 
     there is no consensus at the end of the day that voting is 
     properly regarded as an attribute of adult citizenship and 
     thus as much of a civil right as those that have since 1954 
     been enforced by the courts. We are still, if obscurely, 
     fighting the epic battle between General Ireton and Colonel 
     Rainborough in the British Putney Debates of 1647. That 
     battle was terminated ages ago in the rest of the Western 
     world; and the contrasting modes of election administration 
     simply attest on both sides to this fact.
       It should go without saying that the ongoing collapse of 
     voter participation in American elections outside of the 
     South since 1960 has little enough to do with personal-
     registration requirements as such. For they were much less 
     user-friendly in a great many states in 1960 than in 1996, 
     and yet non-southern turnout topped 70% in the former year, 
     compared with 53% or thereabouts in 1996. Given the general 
     situation surrounding the 1998 election, I would guess that 
     when we finally get the final totals sometime around April 
     1999, we will find that turnout for the US House will fall to 
     somewhere around one-third of the potential electorate (from 
     38% in 1994) and, as such, will display the lowest level of 
     participation among the potential electorate since 1798. All 
     I can say in conclusion is that I like to do my little bit to 
     make democracy live in the United States, and express my firm 
     conviction that--whether we look at election administration 
     or at the campaign-finance imbroglio--the present leadership 
     and followership among the Republican majority in Congress 
     seem to have other objectives.
           Yours very truly,
                                              Walter Dean Burnham,
                                                        Professor.
       P.s.--Now this is something I would be happy to have 
     entered in the Congressional Record!

     

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