Residents Ask Census To Study City's Voting

Nine Cambridge residents--four of them Harvard faculty--have appealed to the U.S. Census Bureau and invoked the 1965 Federal Voting Rights Act in order to force the city to let students register at its polls.

In a letter to Census Director George H. Brown the nine residents document "a prima facie case for (voter) discrimination in Cambridge" and ask "a finding of fact" as to the percentage of those eligible who actually voted for President here in 1968. If this figure falls under 50 per cent--by authority of the 1965 Act of Congress as amended last year--special Federal registrars would intercede to make sure of fully constitutional suffrage.

The protest to Brown culminates six months of study by the citizens' group's organizer, John Brode '52, a Research Fellow at the' Business School. In examining town registration policy he found Harvard students being turned away as lacking proper occupation or residency, in defiance of guidelines from the State Attorney General's office.

Gerald A. Berlin, lecturer on Law, and Professors Everett Mendelsohn and William P. Homans Jr. co-signed the letter with Brode. None expects a quick bureaucratic windfall. "This provision of the '65 Act." Brode said, "has been applied to quite a few counties, especially in the South. But Washington has never sent registrars into a city or town within a country, as Cambridge is within Middlesex. We'll have to wait while the policy-makers decide if they're going to establish a new precedent with us."