Now, in this matter of paying New Jerseyites to urge their fellows to sit home on Election Day, the following sensible observations in an effort to neutralize the many not-so-sensible fulminations:
1. Whatever Ed Rollins and his colleagues did or did not do, nobody was kept away from the polls on Nov. 2 when his candidate, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, defeated Democratic Gov. Jim Florio. No one was intimidated, coerced or even subtly discouraged from voting.
Encouraging citizen apathy is unseemly but not illegal. There is not, nor should there be, any Constitutional guarantee that someone will call you up and ferry you to the polls.
2. Unhappily for the Republican Party and its reputation, it did intimidate, coerce and not-so-subtly discourage people from voting in the very same state of New Jersey in 1981, defeating, as it happens, the very same Florio. A few years later, it employed in Louisiana a shabby stunt designed to discourage some people from voting.
In both cases, the objects of the Republican lower-the-vote effort were black. Because it is not all that long ago that blacks were openly prevented from voting in some parts of the country, the Republican ploys were especially objectionable.
African-Americans, via their religious and political leaders, were also the targets of the “stay-in-the-vote” ploy which Rollins first confessed and then un-confessed the other day. So once more, the Republicans look worse than they would have had their anti-vote effort been multi-racial. One is just anti-democratic. The other seems downright racist. It isn’t. It’s political opportunism. And anti-democratic.
3. If they were made, the alleged payments were part of a concerted effort to discourage voting, all of it legal, common and reprehensible. Republican leaders also made sure that none of their own ran for the State Legislature in heavily Democratic (meaning black) districts, and they kept off the ballots any interesting referenda which might attract the casual voter.
4. There is nothing wrong with political “walking-around money.” On the contrary, there is everything right with it. Sometimes called “street money,” it is a vital, legal and admirable technique for getting out the vote in other-than-affluent areas.
In affluent areas, there are enough people with spare time, money and energy to make the phone calls, provide the transportation and buy coffee for their assistants without having to get paid. These are people who continue to draw their salaries even if they take the day off. Not everyone is so lucky. In the poorer precincts, giving someone $100 or even $200 for a day’s work getting people to the polls is altogether praiseworthy.
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But, it is said, how do we know they won’t just bribe people to vote?
Because it would be incredibly stupid of them, that’s how.
The precinct worker who uses his $200 to buy votes at a five-dollar-a-vote bargain price gets only 40 voters to the polls, keeps none of the money and risks going to jail. If he plays it straight, uses some of the money to gas up a car or two and a little more to buy sandwiches and coffee for his volunteers, he can vote hundreds of people, keep a few bucks for himself and sleep easy.
The attitude which presumes that there is something nefarious about walking-around money, or that it is regularly misused, is snobbery, the assumption that those in the lower orders are childlike or venal things whose vote must either be bought or commanded, usually by a fat guy with a cigar.
5. All this worry about vote-buying and vote fraud is at least 90 percent mythology. It isn’t that there is none of it. There is still a little in Chicago, West Virginia and a few other spots. But it is no longer widespread.
The authority for the above statement is the Authority in such matters, Curtis Gans, the head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, which also studies misuse of same. “It’s basically a minor problem,” Gans said of vote fraud. “It does exist. But it only happens in a few places, and even in those places there’s less than there used to be.”
Even a little voter fraud is unacceptable. One way to make sure that honorable walking-around money is never converted into corrupt vote-buying is to require all such payments to be made by check, as they already are in some places.
Such is the major provision of legislation proposed by the Republican leadership of New Jersey’s legislature. Other states might well consider following their lead as soon as the bill is passed and signed by Christy Whitman, after she takes office, as she should.