Making Citizens Into Voters : The appeal of “motor-voter” registration bill

All Americans live more stratified lives than the country sometimes cares to admit. Among American cities, Los Angeles--traveling mostly by private car, residing in economically and often physically segregated neighborhoods--sorts and separates its citizenry more aggressively than most. There are few places in this city where a Walt Whitman could say “I hear America singing”; few places, that is, where without regard for income or color or religion, we all mingle.

The military was once the place where democracy was on display in this sense. Public schools were another place where Americans met their fellow Americans. Now, we have a voluntary military: Many Americans never serve. As for the public schools, a large chunk of the population has put its children in private schools.

What’s left? Stop in at the nearest office of the California Department of Motor Vehicles. There are ways for the better-heeled to avoid even this contact with the population at large, but, by and large, the DMV is a portal through which all eventually pass.

This week, the Senate approved by a 61-38 vote a bill that would make everyone who passes through that portal a registered voter unless a person specifically opts not to register. “Motor-voter” registration, already backed overwhelmingly by the House, does not guarantee, needless to say, that the thousands of new registrants it would create will bother to go to the polls. But it may well mean that some thousands from the politically inactive bottom quarter of the population may vote for the first time in their lives.

President Bush, seeing a danger of voter fraud, promises a veto. The League of Women Voters, backing the reform, maintains that built-in safeguards are more than adequate. As we try to put our burned and broken city back together again, anything that makes functioning citizens out of mere residents is worth a try.