THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 31, 1995 TAG: 9503310535
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Once again, today's Republican Party seems bent on throwing itself under the wheels of history.
Gov. George Allen is joining other GOP governors in a court battle challenging the new federal law making it easier to register to vote.
This is sad. Much of the growth of Virginia's modern GOP lay in trying to broaden the electorate by abolishing the poll tax from the right to vote.
In the South, up until 1965, you had to pay to register to vote.
In Virginia, a body coughed up $1.50 to register 60 days before the general election. Thereafter, to keep registration in good standing, the poll tax had to be paid for three successive years.
The abolition of the tax was a major plank of the platform of Republican Ted Dalton of Radford during his two heroic campaigns for governor in the 1950s.
Then, the Virginia GOP was but a fragment of a political party in many localities. Dalton gave the Republican Party respectability by judging issues on whether they were right for Virginia.
Why, in some Virginia areas, lieutenants of Harry Byrd's conservative Democratic organization would spread the word that Republicans were catering to the blacks.
Then the Democrats would turn around just before the election and privately finance a major black ``bag man'' to swing black votes to the Democratic ticket.
Democrats played it both ways, first using the poll tax to keep the electorate small, and thereby easier to manage, and then buying surreptitiously what few blacks votes there were. It was a shameful game.
Allen will ask the General Assembly to delay new rules allowing registration by mail and at state offices until as late as July 1996 while he pursues litigation.
``It's an unfunded mandate on the states, and we ought to be able to determine our own registration laws,'' Allen said this week.
``It's very important that we be able to hold elections fairly and without fraud.''
Before any Virginian, especially any Virginia governor, talks about holding elections fairly and without fraud, he should look at the shadow that falls across this state.
In the mid-1950s, when the General Assembly was erecting Massive Resistance to court-ordered school desegregation, it adopted a law requiring that a citizen seeking to register to vote be handed a blank sheet of paper and left to his or her own devices to figure out what to put on it.
A form of any sort troubles me. Handed a blank sheet and told to fill it out, I'd have had to hand it right back and slink away. As with many, white and black.
Registering to pull the lever in a voting booth ought to be as easy as breathing, especially in this land in which Thomas Jefferson, who said we were born free, is quoted so frequently by politicians, including Gov. Allen. by CNB