"Motor Trouble for Democrats" by Geoff Earle, in Governing (Aug. 1995), 2300 N St. N.W., Ste. 760, Washington, D.C. 20037.

Fearing it could only hurt Republicans and help Democrats, GOP leaders in Congress and elsewhere dug in their heels against the 1994 "motor voter" law, which lets citizens register to vote when they renew their driver's licenses. Democrats, for their part, expected to sign up millions of "natur- al" Democrats-the poor, the young, the mobile-dissuaded from enrolling in the traditional ways. In California, GOP gover- nor Pete Wilson called the law "flatly unconstitutional" and refused to enforce it (until a federal court last June made him); a handful of other Republican governors sim- ilarly resisted. As it turns out, however, reports Earle, an editor at Congressional Quarterly, it seems that if anyone should be worried, it's the Democrats.

In the first three months after the legisla- tion took effect at the start of 1995 (later in some states), it produced two million new registrants, Earle says, including "a large new crop of independents-many of them in areas where Democrats might have expected to reap motor voter dividends." In

Kentucky, for example, where only three percent of voters were registered as independents in 1992, about 25 percent of the new voters registered as independents.

Registration rose fastest in the increasingly Republican South. In Florida, 250,000 people registered under the new law. In both states, the two parties lost ground to the fast-growing independents, but the Democrats lost much more than the Republicans.

In the end, though, the motor voter law may not much hurt or help either party, Earle says. Young people and people who recently moved are prominent among motor-voter registrants, and when it comes to voting, neither group acts much differently from their neighbors. If everybody who might have registered and voted in the last election had done so, Berkeley political scientist Raymond Wolfinger says, "the outcome . . . would have been about the same."