member of the majority is unable to return, Mr. Frenzel would be kind enough to take the chair, to hear the rest of the witnesses. Mr. WIGGINS. How about 4 o'clock this afternoon?

Mr. ROESER. I thank the chairman. That will be excellent.
Chairman THOMPSON. Mr. Wiggins suggests 4 o'clock.

Mr. FRENZEL. We are likely to be voting. I think we would be better off going ahead.

Chairman THOMPSON. I certainly have enough faith in Mr. Frenzel that I am perfectly comfortable with him chairing, as distinguished from Mr. Wiggins. I wore this shirt today so that his needles wouldn't show. The committee will recess.

[Recess.]

Mr. FRENZEL. [Presiding.] The committee will come to order. Mr. Roeser, chairman of Project LEAP, with Mr. Richard Barnett, and Mr. Sheldon Gardner.

Would you introduce yourselves briefly and then proceed with your statement? The statements that you have prepared for us will become part of the record, and anything you care to say in addition we will be pleased to hear.

STATEMENT OF THOMAS ROESER, CHAIRMAN, PROJECT LEAP (LEGAL ELECTIONS IN ALL PRECINCTS); ACCOMPANIED BY: SHELDON GARDNER, PROJECT LEAP BOARD MEMBER; AND RICHARD L. BARNETT, PROJECT LEAP BOARD MEMBER

Mr. ROESER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My name is Tom Roeser, chairman of Project LEAP which stands for Legal Elections in All Precincts, a Chicago-based, nonpartisan election watchdog organization. To my left is Richard Barnett, who is on our board of directors and who serves as a key person and a troubleshooter to spot vote fraud in Chicago and Cook County. To my right, Sheldon Gardner, a founder of Project LEAP and former deputy State's attorney of Cook County.

Project LEAP grew out of efforts by Democrats, Republicans and Independents to fight election abuses by recruiting, placing and training honest election judges to safeguard the voting process. Thanks partly to our activities, Chicago's reputation as "the vote fraud capital of the nation" has been turned around. Although we still have problems-most notably the practice of illegal assistance, where campaign workers or even election judges unlawfully pull the levers for intimidated voters-we have reached a point where we can pretty safely say that candidates no longer win or lose because of stolen votes. That is the way it has been up to now. We feel very candidly that this law, if it passes, should be called the onsite voter fraud bill, because it will set back our efforts easily many decades.

But in spite of Chicago's great progress in the 5 years since Project LEAP ws formed, our work goes on. Without Project LEAP's monitoring, we would see a quick return to the cesspool conditions of former days-with totally false registrations . . . "ghost" voting by those long dead or moved away. . . voting by telephone . . . and all the other tricks precinct captains developed over the years to produce inflated vote totals. Chicago voters traditionally have been

intimidated into yielding to illegal patronage power, selling their voting rights for bottles of wine and a handful of dollars. The victims usually are the poor and the powerless.

The experience of Project LEAP with the Chicago process, including our formerly severe problems with fraudulent registrations and "ghost" voters, led our board of directors to repudiate legislation which would set up an onsite, instant, universal voter registration system-no matter how good it sounds. We call this concept a mislabeled reform that will set anti-vote fraud efforts back 20 years by throwing away the safeguards that guard the integrity of the ballot box. We are here to oppose not only this particular bill, but also the concept of onsite registration, because with instant registration there is a possibility of instant fraud. There is no way to prevent a fraudulent vote from being cast and counted.

We also point out that in two basically fraud-free States already implementing onsite registration, there have been serious administrative problems.

As a former Minnesotan, a former aide to a Governor of Minnesota, I was interested to see in Minneapolis in 1976 there were 4,415 multiple errors made on 12,400 election day registration cards.

In Mankato, Minnesota in 1976, three university students vouched for 472 election day registrants. Later they admitted they did not know many of the persons they had vouched for. And in Milwaukee, Wis. in 1976, onsite voter registration procedures were so chaotic that an estimated 10 percent of election day registrants purposefully or accidentally voted in the wrong ward in six wards studied by a reporter and a State legislator. The chairman of this committee has a lengthy report from that legislator.

Project LEAP predicts that such problems would be far too frequent if this bill passes, in States throughout the nation. With me today are two Project LEAP board members who know the election process firsthand-Sheldon Gardner, the first chairman of Project LEAP, who served until recently as deputy Cook County State's Attorney in charge of prosecuting vote fraud in the entire county and the leader of the Independent voters of Illinois, and Richard Barnett, who serves our organization as an election day troubleshooter and who knows firsthand the difficulties of the inner-city precincts. Both will be making statements, but before I turn to them I would like to make a few points that must be kept in mind about instant voter registration.

First, Project LEAP is following the League of Women Voters, who testified the other day, in order of our testimony-but not in philosophy. We are here in direct contradiction to many reform and good government groups that have jumped on the universal voter registration bandwagon, the league included. We charge that this bill is a master of deceptive packaging, designed to lure us into thinking it is a great reform. We are told we will be getting voting utopia. The National League and other groups have endorsed this bill and the concept of onsite voter registration with the hope that it will spur greater voting participation.

Frankly, this view is appalling from any organization designed to fight for reform. To us, this bill is designed partially for public relations posturing. It comes from a desire to chalk up easy "re

forms" and also stems from the wish of some politicians to identify some reason for public apathy beyond their own performance in public office. Thus it has become the fashion to say that we have so many non-voters because people face difficulty in getting registered. This view flies in the face of reality. Twentieth century America has seen an enormous drop in voter turnout for presidential elections-from 73 percent in 1900 to 53 percent in 1976-all the while incorporating an extension of the voting franchise as supported by most Americans. I personally supported all civil rights bills aimed at extending voting-not because they would solve public concern with apathy, but because they were right.

The Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968, the two voting rights acts in 1965 and 1970, laws that set up Federal registration in those states and counties where racial restriction of the vote was inferred from low voter turnout, which outlawed racial discrimination and actions that could be viewed as race-related, such as literacy tests, legislation which instituted review of State election law changes for those states where past policies were racially restrictive. I also served on the Board of the Youth Citizenship Fund, which fought for the adoption of the 18-year-old voting amendment.

At this point, with this so-called reform, I personally call a halt. Not because such legislation will add to voter participation, but because it will open the door to fraudulent registration and voting. And every stolen vote dilutes the strength of every vote legitimately cast.

Second, organizations such as the League must understand that the intent and the acuality of this bill will be two different things. The bill's goal-and a commendable one-is to add legitimate voters. The bill's actuality-and a frightening one-will be the addition of untold phony voters and phony votes.

My colleagues can tell you about the struggle that is continuing in Chicago even today to keep the voting lists honest and to prevent on-site vote fraud. Passage of this legislation would worsen the number of honest errors committed by election judges and, additionally, throw open the flood gates to vote thieves.

By a conservative estimate, between 8 and 10 mllion illegal aliens now live in the United States. It was to counteract improper voting by aliens and others not qualified to vote that State registration was first conceived. Project LEAP and other groups and individuals have helped push for reforms, investigations and prosecutions. This legislation lowers the barrier to accommodate those politicians who improperly use patronage clout and pressures, and to admit the millions of illegal aliens who become pawns in an effort to stay in this country.

Third, my personal view is that the best course for our Nation to take is to institute national registration such as is undertaken in Canada. There, registration is conducted door to door by local residents with the central government coordinating and financing the procedures. Accurate registers are considered so important that the length of Canadian election campaigns is determined by the time deemed necessary to enroll the electorate. The time generally lasts two months, and new election rolls are compiled for each

national election in the hope that the register will be more accurate if done within 2 months of each national election.

In this way, the first goal-to uphold the electoral process-can be attained. America's legitimacy is too precious to be risked by experimentation with a public relations project that-in the hope of encouraging more voters-hands away the hard-won rights of our citizens.

At this point, I introduce Sheldon Gardner, Board member and first chairman of Project LEAP. Mr. Gardner is a past state chairman of the Independent Voters of Illnois, the Illinois affiliate of the Americans for Democratic Action. He is an attorney experienced in election law and prosecution, having served as the Chief of the Civil Division of the Cook County State's Attorney's office from 1973 to 1976.

Mr. Gardner.

Mr. FRENZEL. You may proceed, Mr. Gardner.

Mr. GARDNER. It was interesting hearing there was no election fraud in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. We are always faced with the idea that because no one prosecutes a crime, the crime doesn't exist. To begin with, I think we all know election fraud is possibly the most unprosecuted crime in the United States.

I would like to bring you back to some of our experiences because we have been lucky about being able to do certain things in the last five and a half years to turn around an extremely serious vote fraud problem, in a situation where for years we were told there was no vote fraud in Chicago, that in reality vote fraud was only the name the enemies of the machine used to cover up its shortcomings.

One of the reasons that so many diverse elements from Chicago oppose on-site voter registration-Project LEAP, all three downtown newspapers, several leaders of the Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County, the Chairman of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, the Cook County Clerk, the Independent Voters of Ilinois, the State's Attorney of Cook County, and the Chicago and Illinois Women's Political Caucuses-is that past vote fraud was a badge of dishonor on the entire city.

Until 1972, Chicago had the reputation of being one of the Nation's leading vote fraud cities. It was said that we so respected our dead that we kept them voting year after year. Estimates of stolen votes varied from 50,000 to 200,000 in more than a thousand suspect precincts, or nearly a third of the city's polling places. Prior to 1972, anti-vote-fraud efforts were well organized but dismally and frustratingly unsuccessful. Pollwatchers assigned to problem precincts were refused admittance, or were tossed out by dishonest election judges the minute they protested. Control rested in the hands of the five election judges and the precinct captain, who was pressured by the patronage system to bring in an assigned vote total to protect his job.

However, in the March 1972 primary and November 1972 general elections, Project LEAP election judges were on duty for the first time. Specially trained to prevent vote fraud and to record information about irregularities, the Project LEAP judges served as the first information gathering system to crack the fraud network.

In the vote fraud cases handled in the Federal courts by the U.S. District Attorney following the March 1972 primary, there were more than 100 indictments and 50 convictions. there was evidence that in some precincts, up to 200 votes were stolen for favored candidates. In some cases, ballot applications were forged. In one particularly blatant instance, more than 100 votes were registered on the voting machines before the polling place was opened for voters. In another-in plain view of a candidate and five newspaper reporters who stood outside with their noses pressed to the windows-the precinct captain and the election judges rang up vote after vote on the machines.

These indictments and convictions resulted because honest election judges and pollwatchers testified in Federal courts against these criminal procedures.

Since then, an active alliance of three elements-media and concerned reform groups such as Project LEAP; local and Federal prosecutors; and the administrator of the Chicago Board of Election Comissioners appointed in 1973-has continued the vigilance against election abuses.

Unfortunately, the great pressure to commit vote fraud remains the abuse of the patronage system, which links job security with the vote totals the city or county jobholders can bring in from their precincts. Unfortunately again, on-site voter registration will create additional temptation for precinct captains who may continue to feel that both their political career and their job future rest upon the vote totals they deliver. Even though the leaders of Chicago's Regular Democratic Organization oppose this bill, individual precinct captains may view the concept as a re-opening of a climate in which to commit fraud.

From a prosecutor's viewpoint, the most serious deficiency in the concept of on-site voter registration is the inability to police the system and then to find false registrants and voters after election day. A celebrated example of this difficulty is a continuing investigation conducted by Chicago's Better Government Association from 1964 through 1976.

For 12 years the BGA monitored false registration in the 27th Ward, immediately west of the Loop, which includes Chicago's skid row section. In 1968 the BGA's chief investigator checked into a fleabag hotel under the name "James Joyce." He stayed for about 5 minutes. He never returned. However, "James Joyce" soon appeared on a voter registration list. On election day, "James Joyce" voted. Since only two persons-the investigator and a newspaper reporter-knew who "James Joyce" was, it was clear that the vote was cast fraudulently. The Chicago Daily News, which participated in the massive investigation of false registrations with the BGA, was filled with the names of persons who either registered or voted falsely for that 1968 general election.

Then came Project LEAP. In 1972, the Chicago Tribune cooperated with Project LEAP in another massive vote fraud investigation. However, this time Project LEAP had honest election judges in precincts throughout the city, including many Tribune reporters. The resultant expose, which included undercover work by a reporter at the office of the Chicago Board of Election Comissioners, brought the Tribune a Pulitzer prize.