A pair of Assembly bills designed to bring more young people into the voting booths are being fought by Republicans who worry that too many of those new voters will be liberal Democrats.

    One of the measures would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to "preregister" to vote, while the other would allow 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 by the date of the next general election. Both bills have prompted straight party-line votes, with no hint of GOP support.

    While Democrats sponsoring the bills say they are merely good-government measures, studies show that their party would get a major election-day boost if more young voters cast ballots.

    Exit polls done during this year's presidential primary season showed that the number of voters younger than 30 has more than doubled since the 2004 and 2000 elections, with Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, drawing an enthusiastic and growing response from those young voters.

    It's only natural that young voters would be more inclined to be liberal and to register Democratic, said Assemblyman Anthony Adams, R-Hesperia (San Bernardino County), vice chair of the Assembly's Election and Redistricting Committee.

    "I'm a pretty conservative guy now, but when I was 17 I was a raging liberal," Adams said. "You start to see problems as you get older. As you get older, you get wiser."

    He also argued that it would be wrong to set up a situation where political parties could send organizers into California high schools and attempt to recruit impressionable students.

    "Our concern is that we want an informed and worldly electorate, and here we have these kids in high school and they're trying to get a grasp of the world," Adams said. "The assumption is that they're not able to make informed decisions, so we have to have a legitimate cutoff" date.

    17-Year-Old Voters

    But to Democratic Assemblyman Gene Mullin, D-South San Francisco, many of the students he taught in 32 years of high school government classes were better informed than their elders.

    "These young people are in school and hearing discussions of issues in their classes," he said. "Republicans are afraid we're going to register a lot of Democrats, but most teenagers tend to register in the party of their parents."

    Mullin introduced the constitutional amendment giving 17-year-olds the right to vote in primary elections because it "would allow these individuals to support their chosen candidate through all stages of the campaign."

    Virginia, Maine, Indiana and North Carolina are among the states that already have similar laws.

    Because the amendment, ACA15, needs a two-thirds vote to get out of the Assembly, Mullin admitted that he needs some help from Republicans that he isn't likely to get.

    The Democratic bills would not give a boost to Republicans, Democrats or any other group, said Assemblyman Curren Price Jr., D-Inglewood (Los Angeles County), who is carrying the preregistration measure, AB1819, which has the backing of Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters.

    "This is a step we can take to encourage voting involvement at an early age," he said. "People who get involved at a young age are more likely to become regular voters."

    The measure would allow teenagers to fill out a registration form so that they would automatically be registered the day they turn 18.

    Florida and Hawaii already have similar laws on the books, and a handful of other states, including Texas, Iowa and Missouri, allow 17-year-olds to preregister.

    Price described his bill as "a way of tapping into the interest young people have expressed this year," while not mentioning that much of that excitement was bolstering Democratic campaign efforts.

    Under-30s Lean to Obama

    A poll done earlier this month for the Democratic-leaning Democracy Corps found that 60 percent of the 18- to 29-year-old voters surveyed backed Obama for president, with 33 percent supporting Republican Sen. John McCain. While 44 percent identified themselves as Democrats, 21 percent called themselves Republicans.

    But it's not a political party that attracts young voters, said Chrissy Faessen, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan Rock the Vote, which works to bring more young people to the polls and into the political process.

    "Young people do in this election favor Obama, but they care about issues," she said. "They will vote for the individuals who respond to the same issues they do."

    While arguing that persuading young people to vote is strictly a nonpartisan issue, Democrats aren't shedding any tears over Republican worries about the growing partisan preference shown by young voters.

    "If that's the way the wind is blowing, so be it," said Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the California Democratic Party. "This is a testament to the effort and work we've put on issues important to them."

    The GOP's opposition to the two young-voter bills doesn't mean Republicans are abandoning teenage voters as a lost cause, said Hector Barajas, a spokesman for the state Republican Party. California already is doing plenty to make it easy for new voters to register and doesn't need expensive new programs that may or may not work, he added.

    "In an election year like this, the youth vote is going to be important," Barajas said. "We're not going to concede the youth vote, the black vote, the Latino vote or any other group in the state."

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    Young-Voter Bills

    Click the bill to read the text and legislative histories of AB1819 and ACA15.