Getting Out the Youth Vote

...Washington-USA GETTING OUT THE YOUTH VOTE BY JONATHAN COTTIN WASHINGTON WHEN Richard Nixon signed the official proclamation enfranchising 18-year-olds nearly four months ago, he was hoping that all the new voters would be just like the freshly scrubbed young witnesses at the ceremony Short of hair, square of jaw, conservative in manner and dress, they were, in fact, remarkably like the President himself But Nixon knows that a majority of the nation's 114 million citizens between 18 and 21 are not as reliably Republican as were his visitors And despite his amicable charade in the White House that day, the Administration's record on the youth vote has been consistently hostile Attorney General John Mitchell, Nixon's top pol, started battling the proposal as soon as it began moving through Congress last year He dispatched a deputy to the Hill to ar-gue that a lowering of the minimum age should not be mandated by law The emissary, well aware that previous efforts to gam suffrage for 18-year-olds through the Amendment process had failed, contended that any other means would be unconstitutional Congress ignored his warning and tacked the youth franchise to the 1970 Voting Rights Act Nixon signed the bill reluctantly, heeding advice from the liberal minority on his staff that a veto would be politically more disastrous than adding millions of kids to the rolls To cover himself with conservative lawyers, the Piesident suggested that the 18-year-old-vote rider would be found unconstitutional The nine attorneys on the Supreme Court, however, said Nixon had no cause for worry They upheld youth suffrage for all Federal elections Congress followed by passmg the 26th Amendment to that effect, and national ratification was quickly achieved Having failed to block the youth vote, the Administration is now seeking to cushion its impact In August, Mitchell told a meeting of state secretaries of state that the 26th Amendment did not imply that out-of-town students had to be registered in university communities (The Amendment did not forbid it, either ) Rummaging through his rationale kit, Mitchell unearthed an old reliable watchword to support his thesis It wasn't as compelling as the ' unconstitutional" smokescreen, but it would have to do States Rights "Extending the vote to 18-year-olds should not affect the residency requirements now prevailing in the states," he said Undoubtedly the Attorney GenerJONATHAN COTTIN covers U S po-litical affairs for National Journal al's remarks represented his heartfelt commitment to principle They certainly were not calculated to drive young people into the arms of the Republican party Indeed, Nixon's political advisers are not happy about the weight youth will carry in '72 As one Nixon aide told Dom Bonafede, White House correspondent for National Journal, the 18-year-old vote is a "killer we could lose California and 20-25 Republican congressmen because of it " At the offices of the Committee for the Reelection of the President, which Mitchell will soon command, the word is out to cool it on the new voters Kenneth Rietz, who helped Bill Brock beat Albert Gore in the Tennessee Senate race last year, is running the youth campaign for Nixon, thus far his tactics have been inaction and silence A team of eager youngsters are poised at the Republican National Committee, with its pipeline to gop youth groups across the nation Eager to begin a registration drive, all they need is the word from Rietz They may wait a long time Meanwhile, the Democrats have garnered two-thirds of the 1 million 18-21-year-olds enrolled to date Democratic National Chairman Lawrence F O'Bnen has given the go-ahead for an aggressive registration drive, and he has received one His staff has made contact with more than two dozen nonpartisan groups which have sprung up to get young people to the polls, with the odds stacked m their favor, the Democrats don't care who brings them in Phillip Serb, O'Brien's 23-year-old youth vote specialist, has been luring students into the party by touting reform He tells unaffiliated prospects that the Fraser-McGovern Commission on Delegate Selection has made another Chicago impossible, that the commission's rules guarantee young people their share of delegate seats next year in Miami Beach, that he wants them inside the convention hall picking a nominee, not out on the streets picketing YET WHILE the winds of reform may be sweeping students toward the Democratic party, few fresh breezes are blowing through local election boards around the country—and that is where the young must regis-ter Common Cause, the citizens lobby headed by John W Gardner, has set up a voting project to deal exclusively with registration and polling barriers to the newly enfranchised Already it has compiled a list of 24 states where either law or the opinions of the attorney general render it virtually impossible for nonresident students to vote in college towns The lobby won its first big legal test in California on August 27, when the State Supreme Court ruled that citizens should be able to vote where they reside "Compelling young people who live apart from their parents to travel to their parents' district to legister and vote as absentees burdens their right to vote ' Gardner's organization hopes to get the matter settled m the U S Supreme Court this fall Nevertheless, of the more than 25 million American youths who will be eligible to vote in their first Presidential election next yeai, less than 10 per cent are out-of-town collegians Accordingly, labor unions and other liberal action groups hope to recruit dependably Democratic voters from among young housewives, blacks, Chicanos, and unemployed The United Auto Workeis Union has 100 paid community organizers developing registration drives at high schools and community colleges in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and California, where many members have children in school Last spring, the Alliance for Labor Action (ala), the uaw-Teamsters coalition, ran successful youth enrollment campaigns in New Mexico and California, concentrating on the high schools Carl Wagner, an ala staffer, says that for most of the disadvantaged black and Chicano youth, high school is the last place they can be reached "If we don't get them there, we'll never catch up with them, because they'll either be out of woik or holding low-paying jobs that are nonunionized " Frontlash, the New York-based youth registration project partially funded by the AFL-CIO, has been working the inner city with success, more than half of the 18-21-year-olds in New York City are on the voting lists Although labor leadeis have identified the underprivileged young as a major souice of political strength, they will be unable to mount a massive, nationwide registration effort ala will not renew its spring effort because of a lack of funds The law, with other demands on its depleted treasury and a freeze to fight, may not be capable of a sustained push And no nationwide youth vote pro-gram has surfaced at the AFL-CIO This may please White House strategists, but union leaders aie not too worried They remember that the margin in the 1968 Presidential election was only 300,000 votes, and recognize that Richard Nixon may drive more disaffected young people to the polls than any registration campaign...