Formally known as the National Voter Registration Act, it was passed and vetoed in 1992 by Bush the Elder, and finally signed into law by Clinton in 1994. The next year, it became law in Massachusetts.

“Progressive activists should savor this clear-cut victory,” wrote a leading housing activist at the time. Peter Dreier was not alone in hoping that the new law might “dramatically alter the terrain of American politics. It could significantly expand voter registration among low-income and minority Americans.”

Nothing of the sort happened.

The rolls of registered voters did increase—dramatically. For example, Boston’s registration numbers, after dropping from 281,000 to 202,000 between 1985 and 1995, soared to over 340,000 in just five years.

But the number of people actually voting in Boston hardly changed at all. In fact, 6,482 fewer Bostonians voted in 2002 than in 1990. Both years featured hard-fought governor’s races.

The reason for this is that Motor Voter makes it much harder than before to remove the names of people who have moved away from the city or town in which they are registered. The government’s term for this process is “purging.” You might check the dictionary for some of the earthier meanings of this word.

At the same time, new names are added to voter rolls so easily that some fear it encourages voting fraud. If people are voting twice, however, there aren’t enough of them to keep the vote totals from falling.

It is at the "purging" end of the process that there is a real problem.

Motor Voter says that, unless local authorities have received some official notice, names of non-voting voters cannot be removed from the rolls for two whole election cycles—in practice, four to six years. Because of this, a big percentage of your community’s “registered voters” are phantoms. They’re not really there anymore, but the law still sees them—and that has real consequences.

To put a question on the local ballot, a petition must be signed by a certain percentage of the city’s total number of registered voters. The "phantoms" cannot sign petitions, although they increase the number of signatures required.

This makes it harder for petitioners to get the required signatures, but it's still possible.

Once the petition has become a ballot question, it is not enough that a majority of those voting should approve the question. The law says that majority must equal at least one-third of the registered voters.

That makes winning almost impossible. In most cases, the winning total is larger than the entire normal turnout for a local election.

How did we find out about this?

In 1999, Cambridge Citizens for Rent Equity (CCURE) was trying to get a rent control question on the city ballot. With a week to deadline, the petitioners were abruptly told that the city’s working definition of registered voters had changed. Rather than 42,185 as they had been told a few months earlier, the figure was now 58,527.

CCURE sued the City of Cambridge [Al-Weqayan v. Drugan]. Attorney David Hoicka had found that Cambridge retained on its voting rolls the names of

• 3,475 who had registered as dormitory residents and since graduated college

• 5,229 who had already been classified as "inactive voters" for three years

• 11,399 who had moved out of the city and left change-of-address notices with the US Postal Service. [A 1991 study for the Postal Service estimated that 80-85 percent of households file change-of-address forms when they move.]

A year later, CCURE dropped its suit, in exchange for the Cambridge City Council's unanimous adoption of a home rule petition to change the rules governing the initiative petition process. Secretary of State Galvin’s office opposed the city’s petition, citing the need for a solution for all cities and towns affected rather than just Cambridge.

An analysis done for the Green-Rainbow Party last year [on the Bridge website http://bridgenews.org/background/votercharts.pdfreport] confirmed that the gap between actual voting and inflated registration does affect almost every city and large town in the Commonwealth. Brookline actually has more registered voters than it has adult citizens eligible to vote.

The Secretary of State’s office did not follow up. Rep. Paul Demakis (D-Boston, Cambridge)filed a bill last year to change the rules for qualifying local petitions. At the bill’s hearing, Secretary Galvin’s office opposed House 1267.

Acting for a coalition which included Mystic River Green-Rainbow Action and the Cambridge Eviction Free Zone, attorney Jeff Feuer pushed for a conference with Galvin's office.

The conference took place some weeks later. Michelle Tassinari of Secretary Galvin’s office suggested rewriting H.1267 to change the criteria for local petitions from a percentage of the registered voters to a percentage of the voter turnout in the most recent state election.

This would essentially bring local election law into line with the law for statewide petitions. Demakis and the coalition accepted this concept, which would clearly resolve the main problem created by the Moter Voter law.

The bill is still pending in the Election Laws Committee, but Rep. Demakis expects it to be reported favorably in the next several weeks. "I am hopeful,” he said at the end of January, “that the Legislature will make the initiative and referendum process at the local level as fair and democratic as it is at the state level by enacting H.1267." [2005 update—Despite a favorable report, the modified bill died. Demakis did not run for re-election, and the bill has not been revived.]

A nationwide problem

This problem is a national one. Motor Voter is the law in 44 states and the District of Columbia, and its peculiar side effects have been widely noted.

Three years ago, the Los Angeles Times (12/11/00) looked at Indiana, and found the Hoosier State already had 4 million registered voters in a population of 6 million. Inactive voters had formerly been purged after four years. Getting them off the lists now took at least eight additional years. CBS News reported (6/26/01) that eighteen municipalities in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, had “more registered voters than voting-age adults.”

One unfortunate result of this, as Dr John Samples (where do they get these names?) of the libertarian Cato Institute told a committee of the US Senate (3/14/01), is to exaggerate the voting public’s impression of its own apathy. “Voting turnout as a percentage of registered voters is much higher than we believed because registration rolls are so inflated” with persons who no longer reside in the same communities.