Statement of Administration Policy: S. 250 - National Voter Registration Act of 1991

(SENT 6/16/92)
(House)
(Ford (D) Kentucky and 35 others)

The Administration endorses the goal of increasing participation in the electoral process, and supports the Michel amendment to S. 250, which is designed to achieve this result. However, S. 250 contains serious flaws, and attempts to improve it in the Senate were defeated. Therefore, if S. 250 were presented to the President in its current form, his senior advisors would recommend a veto.

S. 250 would rewrite the election laws of virtually all States (except for States with no voter registration requirement at all or States with election day registration). It would require the States to employ three methods of registering voters for Federal elections, and specify in considerable detail what the States would have to do to implement each one. No funds are authorized to fund this expensive new Federal mandate on the States.

The Administration opposes S. 250 in its current form because: (1) no sufficient justification has been demonstrated for imposing extensive procedural requirements and significant related costs on the States; (2) the bill would increase substantially the risk of voter fraud without enacting any effective criminal prohibitions that go beyond the limits of existing law; and (3) the Voting Rights Act of 1965 already provides sufficient tools to challenge registration procedures that are discriminatory.

States have used a variety of procedures to guard against fraud and maintain the integrity of the electoral process. This flexibility has allowed the States to tailor procedures to local conditions that may make some practices more effective than others or may call for special measures to avoid fraud or for avoiding certain practices entirely. This bill would prevent States from implementing procedures that are responsive to local conditions.

S. 250 would increase the potential for corruption and vote fraud. The bill limits the State's ability to confirm independently the information contained in voter registration applications and severely restrict the States' ability to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. This problem would be compounded by the inadequate penalties in current Federal criminal law for electoral crimes and other forms of public corruption.

The Administration supports the Michel amendment, which would give States an incentive to implement voluntarily nondiscriminatory registration procedures through a system of Federal block grants with a matching fund requirement for States. The Michel amendment would also clamp down on public corruption through stiffer fines and by expanding the scope of Federal jurisdiction to prosecute election crimes.