Mr. AMMERMAN. I can't understand the opposition to this on any other basis than typical Republican desire to have a minimum turnout. I really don't understand it.

Mr. HANLY This is not partisan. I am a Democrat and I have talked to everybody in the political spectrum in Chicago and I haven't found one responsible political leader from anywhere in the spectrum who wants any part of this. The objective of this legislation is to bring people into the system we want to do that and have demonsrated a deep desire to do it and are prepared to go forward, but I ask you not to impact our voting places, not to expose our system to fraud because we have paranoia in Chicago like no place else in the world. We don't need it.

Mr. AMMERMAN. Well, I disagree with you. Thank you. [Attachments to Mr. Hanly's statement follow:]

STATEMENT BY JOHN H. HANLY, CHAIRMAN, CHICAGO BOARD OF ELECTION COMMISSIONERS, CHICAGO, ILL.

I thank you for your courtesy and consideration in hearing our views on the proposed election day registration at polling places. I come here not as a partisan but as a representative of an election authority who will have to carry out the will of the Congress. My concerns are technical and administrative with an informed base of experience to measure the feasibility and practicability of the proposed legislation. If you enact an impractible statute, it is the election authorities. I hope our views will therefore be seriously considered and given due weight versus those of the theoriticians who have never run an election and have not the slightest inkling of the meticulous planning and operational control required to successfully bring off an election involving a million or more voters. Nor do they understand the penalties of failure should matters go awry.

The Chicago board is not an agency of local government. We are jointly supported by the city of Chicago who payrolls the regular staff while Cook County pays the commissioners and chief clerk. The city and county take turns in financing the costs of elections depending upon whether the offices at stake are municipal only or county, State and Federal.

We now have 1,613,258 registered voters in Chicago which by the best and hardest estimate comprises 75.3% of the eligible voters over 18 years.

I strongly support the concept that we must bring all elements of our city into the system as registered voters who do vote. The Chicago board has worked extremely hard to bring this goal to our city. Three and one half years ago we established an Outreach Program that brought in over 61,000 new voters into the system, mostly black minority and Hispano Americans in the inner city. It is these disadvantaged Americans who must be brought into the mainstream of the American dream. We shall continue to do this and with your help and statutory encouragement we should be able to do a better job. Attached you will find copies of our press releases reporting details of our grass roots program over the past three and one half years. While I support the objectives of H.R. 5440, I regret to inform you that the provisions of subsection 6(a) mandating registration at the polling place on election day will set the cause of honest elections back many years. It will erode the integrity of our elections since it is totally lacking in any safeguards on the front end at the time of registration and voting. Further, it will congest and disrupt our polling places and certainly turn off, if not away, the voter who is civic minded enough to bother to get registered in the normal way. It should be understood that what is good for Minnesota, Wisconsin or North Dakota is not necessarily good for the rest of the country. The unrestrained rave notices about Minnesota are tempered in my mind by the reported experiences in Minneapolis and Mankato, as reported in the Washington Post of April 11, 1977. This clearly should be a danger signal to us all. There are many more ways to beat the system than described in the article. The congestion in Wisconsin is also mentioned in the Post story. Believe me, anything going wrong in smaller jurisdictions will be compounded a hundred fold in Chicago. During peak periods of voting in Chicago 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. We could never cope with the registration even with two additional judges to serve as registrars. Our 3085 polling places could not accommodate another table and room for a lineup for the secondary function of registering since space available is limited

at best. The disruption would unquestionably turn people away as in Wisconsin and the flack ensuing would be monumental. People are touchy in Chicago about their voting although today our board and our elections have the highest degree of public confidence and credibility from the voters and the media. We want to keep it that way. People have a right to have confidence in the integrity of their elections and to vote in a calm, dignified and peaceful atmosphere. This will be denied them if the instant voter registration is cranked into the polling place. The system will be overloaded, and the credibility of the election brought into question. The proposal will simply create chaos in our polling places.

Our judges of election are well trained but underpaid and overworked. Not it is proposed to ask them to make judgments at the polling place with respect to identity and identifcation documents. A check with Casualty Insurance underwriters will disclose the many costly failures in this regard by carefully selected and trained tellers, cashiers and bank officers. How can we expect this degree of professionalism from our judges? We have extreme difficulty in filling vacancies now and with 6000 more required we will be seeking a total of 22,000 instead of 15,500, a figure almost impossible to achieve.

I urge that the emphasis in the new law be placed on special registration efforts such as permanent branch registration sites in every neighborhood in such places as public libraries. With your financial support we could meet the main objectives of this bill and avoid disrupting our polling places, exposing the system to fraud and a general breakdown on election day.

Thank you. Are there any questions?

Chairman THOMPSON. Admiral, thank you very much. Our second witness is the Honorable Stanley Kusper, County Clerk of Cook County, Ill.

STATEMENT OF STANLEY KUSPER, COUNTY CLERK, COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS.

Mr. KUSPER. My purpose in appearing this morning is to hopefully constructively comment upon H.R. 5400. Having had the benefit of the testimony of Mr. Hanly and hearing questions which were. put to him, I think I can answer some of them for you before you have to get around to asking them. My experience in the field of elections goes back now some 16 years. In November, 1961, I was employed by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners as its assistant general counsel. In 1963 I attended to the position of chief attorney to the general counsel for the Board of Election Comissioners and served in that capacity until September, 1969. In 1969 the then chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Comissioners passed away, creating a vacancy, and I was appointed by the Circuit Court of Cook County, which appoints members of the Board of Election Commissioners of Chicago as a member of the three-person board, and two days later I was elected as its chairman by the vote of my colleagues. I served in that capacity as chairman of the board until March, 1973, at which time I was appointed by the County Board of Commissioners of Cook County as the County Clerk of Cook County. I ran for election to that post in 1974 and was elected with a plurality of some 110,000 votes, and I continue to serve in that capacity until next year when I run again, hopefully. I also served on a number of state commissions concerning the drafting and implementation of election laws. For a period of some 7 years I participated with counterparts from upstate and downstate Illinos in both political parties and all sorts of philosophies in the drafting of the comprehensive new election code of the State of Illinois which unfortunately still languishes in the legisla

ture of our State, they not being willing to take the large jump of putting it all in in toto, although some parts have been enacted separately.

I served on the Governors Comission in the State of Illinois for a number of years, advising on the subjct of election laws, and I presently serve as a second vice president of the International Association of Clerks, recorders, Election Officials, and Treasurers, a national organization for over a thousand county officers. I am on the Board of Dirctors of the National Association of Counties. I have had something to do with the legislation. I participated with three of the gentlemen in the drafting of the first outreach program legislation enacted in the State of Illinois providing for mobile unit registration, for temporary places of registration, for deputy registrars and happily that bill was passed in 1966 and it was implemented for the State of Illinois.

With regard to my stewardship at the Board of Election commissioners as its chairman, Mr. Hanly described what his duties were. Mine were basically the same, but I think predated him in that office. I can say with some political pride we did establish the first outreach program in the State of Illinois. We initiated programs of voter registration in post offices throughout the city of Chicago. We went to fire stations for area registrations on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays for the purposes of making it more successful there. We were the first to go to universities and colleges and high schools to register 18-year-olds. In fact, it is documented that the first 18year-olds to register in the United States of America after the enactment of the Supreme Court decision on the matter took place with the Chicago Board of Election Comissioners at 9 o'clock one Saturday morning.

We took all the registrations because no one else took registrations on that day. We operated "Push Expo" for Jesse Jackson, who has not seen eye to eye with me on many issues, but we see eye to eye on voter registration. We had registrations in area places, we worked with various ethnic groups, Hispanic-American friends, with the blacks, with other ethnic groups.

We were the first to go through the mobile unit registration procedure by sending four vans out through suburban Cook County. We established the deputy registrars establishing temporary places of registration in public buildings. In private buidings with high concentrations of public flow. For instance, the Merchandise Mart of the city. The insurance buildings. We have had voter registration programs in banks, savings and loans, shopping centers, grocery stores in the suburban area of Cook County under my jurisdiction. All of this is something we are considerably proud of.

With regard to H.R. 5400, the aim of the legislation, as put forth by the President in his statement, is in itself laudable and desirable. I will speak of this this morning from the standpoint of an administrator in a jurisdiction which is the subject of considerable scrutiny and comment by the media. This is not to be taken as criticism of the media, but to indicate to you that we have a very highly concentrated media situation in Chicago and in Cook County and I have jurisdiction over all elections in suburban Cook County. We watch very carefully what goes on, and who are-at the slightest

drop of a hint of anything-more than happy to freely comment upon it, sometimes accurately and sometimes not in position of all the facts and circumstances dealing with a certain situation. In that regard public service in Chicago and Cook County-and I am sure it is this way in other places in the country, but we speak with particular experience-public service in our area is one which is the subject of the intense, constant surveillance by the media.

If H.R. 5400 is enacted in the present form, we will have placed upon us-unless the state legislature-which is sometimes a bulky creature-unless the State legislature decides that Illinois law should conform to the Federal legislation we will have the same situation as we had at the Supreme Court's decision on the 18-yearold voter question.

We will have two sets of standards, sets of rules. True, the bill provides for economic incentives, but the legislature is not always persuaded with those economic incentives coming from the Federal Government This is not any comment, but my observation of what the legislature does in Illinois and other States.

That may not be sufficient. It is my understanding if all three tiers of the proposed legislation are enacted in Illinois law that some $2,836,000 will flow on the basis of the 20, 40, or 60 sent to the States. If you will think of the situation moving into either a Presidential election or into an even year of a November general election, we basically know how many voters we have, registered voters we have, because we have done our computations; we have our pollists and we have apportioned our voting equipment accordingly. We have some 2,400 polling places in suburban Cook County manned by five judges of elections, depending upon the vote for Governor in the last preceding general election. There are either three Democrats or three Republicans comprising the majority and it breaks down there are more precincts in suburban Cook County because it is basically a Republican area in voter emphasis. Basically, you have more precincts covered by a majority of Republican judges with a minority of two democrats.

We have the votomatic voting system, we do not use mechanical voting machines. Suburban Cook County switched to that punchcard voting device in a very brief 4-month period just prior to the last Presidential election. There were some people who said it couldn't be done. we honestly thought it couldn't be done, but it was done anyway and I think your committee has had some small contact with us in the observance of the procedures that ensued after the last election in the Tenth Congressional District of the State of Illinois, where the race between Mr. Mikva and Mr. Young was some 209 votes apart. Mr. Cable and others of the committee observed and went away with, I hope, favorable impressions of how the voting was conducted.

If we have two sets of rules, if the legislature doesn't say, “Yes, we are going to enact the statutes and yes, we will say you can register for purposes of state elections also," then what we will have is no ability to comprehend how many people may be unregistered and who will walk into the voting place and then ask to vote for only federal offices. We won't know how much equipment to put in there. We may not have any equipment to put in there because on

the basis of one voting device per hundred voters, we don't have enough now and would have to buy more.

If the funding that you are talking about is going to go just as an incentive to the State to try to have outreach programs we already have them, especially in Chicago and suburban Cook County. We have the best outreach programs anywhere in the State of Illinois and I think that is documented and accepted as generally true in the State, so you are not giving us any incentives now that we aren't already doing the things that you want to incite us to do. In the November, 1976 election, I waited 56 minutes at one o'clock in the afternoon to vote. I was in the city of Chicago up on the northwest side. There were two voting machines for my precinct because there were only 600-plus registered voters and the law provides for one machine for a certain number of voters. I was in my office at 3:30 that morning. I go home about one o'clock and get my wife and we vote. My wife waited another 56 minutes with me to vote. There are three polling places or three precincts in the polling place in which I vote. It is in the school gymnasium. There were hundreds of people standing in line for all three polling places and this would be compounded, I am afraid, if we would have registration for only Federal elections, if our legislature doesn't go along, and if you have people attempting to register in the same line. Now, I heard a suggestion made that possibly what you need is a couple of judges of election to be sure that the reistration is taken care of in a different line. That is fine, but judges of elections' salaries on election day are a base $40 per judge. That is $80 per precinct times 2,400 precincts. The mathematical computations indicate that 2 million whatever it is is now starting rapidly to diminish in importance-or effectiveness.

Secondly, if we are going to have to have additional equipment only for election of Federal officers in this coming election in 1978we will have obviously congressmen and the United States Senator, Senator Percy, will be up for re-election if he chooses to run. That also gives us a problem of having separate voting devices for that particular thing, separate voting registration for that, separate balloting, separate counting for that particular thing, separate certification, separate processes all the way up and down the line and two million nine, or eight million nine may not be enough if we have to do that.

True, if this was enacted into law, we would obviously go to the legislature and lobby for it. Have our legislature give us the same law. I think you saw as a consequence of the 18-year-old votes the most rapid adoption of an amendment to the Constitution of the United Sttes to make it applicable to all elections, both Federal and State, that you ever saw simply because the States did not wish to face dual systems of registration and dual systems of voting because of cost factors involved which would be extraordinary. Under this system-under H.R. 5400-there is no provision for any incentives to do purging of the rolls.

Now, I understand from what I have heard here this morningand I have seen it-that Chicago and Cook County have a certain reputation, however undeserved, with regard to the voting process, and Mr. Hanly alluded to the fact Cicero was still connected with