Senate OKs Election Day voter signups.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

SALEM - The Senate's approval Monday of a measure letting people register to vote as late as Election Day conjured two distinct memories:

From supporters, it brought up references to last fall's high-profile presidential race. The Bush-Kerry race boosted Oregon's voter-registration numbers - but might have prompted even more participation if not for Oregon's 21-day cutoff before Election Day for the newly registered to cast ballots.

But others went further back in time, to the mid-1980s, when the Raj- neeshees bused in homeless people from Portland, Washington and California to register as voters so they could help the commune take over Central Oregon's Wasco County government.

The controversy led to a constitutional amendment, backed by most elections officials and passed overwhelmingly by voters in 1986. It ended Oregon's practice of letting people sign up as voters as late as Election Day; instead they were required to be registered by the 21st day prior to an election in order to participate in it.

Senate Joint Resolution 10, passed by the chamber's Democratic majority on a party-line 16-13 vote, would undo that reform.

However, it appears unlikely the measure will gain much traction in the GOP-controlled House.

The partisan vote in the Senate reflected the conventional political wisdom that last-minute voter registration would disproportionately aid Democrats, who tend to have higher levels of support among the general public than Republicans.

The GOP traditionally has lagged in the number of registered voters in Oregon, but has done a better job of turning out its voters - an advantage that some think would wane with election-day registration.

But in public, the issue is debated in a more seemly fashion, with debates over boosting citizen participation versus the need to keep elections free from improperly cast ballots.

Roxann Marshall, Lane County's elections supervisor, said that for county clerks and others in charge of Oregon's elections, SJR 10 brought to mind the Rajneeshees' attempt at vote-rigging.

"It's still a memory that people haven't forgotten," she said. Whenever talk of changing the constitution comes up, "the ones that were here then say, 'No, we can't go back to that again.' "

Among the biggest backers of the change are college and university students - most of whom are too young to remember the Rajneeshees.

Morgan Cowling, legislative director for the Oregon Student Association, said SJR 10 would be a boon for on-campus voter registration drive organizers.

With students arriving on most university campuses in late September, these campaigns have less than two weeks to sign students up before the 21st-day cutoff prevents them from participating in the early-November general election.

"Moving that to allow same-day voter registration would help make sure those campus-based voter-registration drives are more effective at getting to all of the students, and increasing participation for young people," Cowling said.

The measure faces several steps before becoming part of the state constitution: it would have to pass in the House, where the Republican majority is likely to oppose the change, as did GOP lawmakers in the Senate. And then it would be up to voters to decide the issue as a 2006 ballot measure.

Republican foes focus on the issue of fraud. Sen. Jason Atkinson, R-Central Point, said there was plenty of opportunity for people to register to vote under the current system.

"Doing this at the very last minute is not good for the election process," he said.

The measure's sponsor, Sen. Ryan Deckert, D-Beaverton, also played down the partisan angle. He noted that one of the biggest winners in an election-day registration state was neither a Republican nor a Democrat but an independent, Jesse Ventura, who won the governorship in Minnesota in 1994.

He noted that National Conference of State Legislatures research had found voter participation to be about 10 percent higher in the six states with Election Day registration. And the conference had found no increased incidents of election fraud in those states. The guiding principle in how lawmakers vote on setting the voter-registration cutoff, Deckert said, should be "allowing citizens and encouraging citizens to participate in their democracy. Not our democracy, their democracy."