01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 2, 2006

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino wants to increase voter turnout by instituting on-the-spot Election Day voter registration. Any citizen (or non-citizen) could then show up at the polls, register, and immediately cast a ballot.

Currently, voter registration in Massachusetts ends 20 days before an election, allowing time to verify voters' identities. Since the state's municipalities don't set the voting rules, changing the registration process in Boston would require a legislative act.

Nationally, there's a small movement toward same-day registration and voting. Six states that are largely rural (Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Wyoming -- all generally honestly run) have the system. But the unanswerable objection to Mayor Menino's proposal is that in Massachusetts it would be an open invitation to electoral fraud, especially in cities, with their high population turnovers. Nothing beyond a driver's-license check would be available to keep political operatives from getting citizens and non-citizens out to vote "early and often," and there would be no way to discover fraud in time to do anything about it. In a state whose attorney general (Thomas Reilly) has refused to cooperate with federal officials on immigration issues, the idea of instant voting is a non-starter.

Widening participation in our democracy is a laudable goal. But inviting fraud does not enhance democracy, or people's confidence in it.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act, "the motor-voter act," allowed simultaneous licensing to drive and registering to vote, and it resulted in numerous bogus names on the rolls (many inevitable "Mickey Mouses" and "Donald Ducks"). More of this, and worse, is what could be expected in Boston from same-day registration and voting.