The Shuttle Vote

As the 13,314 voters trooped up the cobblestoned streets of little San Marino and into the polling places, there were some who seemed obviously out of place. Amidst the somberly dressed mountain folk of the world's oldest (founded A.D. 301) and tiniest (24 sq. mi.) republic were a number of men in aloha shirts and women with bouffant hairdos, looking like so many American tourists who had wandered into the wrong queue.

The visitors were, in fact, American tourists--San Marinese emigres who had left the tiny republic in the Apennines of northern Italy years ago to settle in New York, Detroit and Sandusky, Ohio. But they were in the right queue. With their families, 450 San Marinese had enthusiastically boarded jets holding tickets paid for by the republic's Christian Democratic Party. Their mission was to help the Christian Democrats, leaders of the coalition that has ruled the country since 1957, stave off a ballot-box challenge by San Marino's Communist Party.

Left-Wing Advantage. There was nothing illegal about it. San Marino allowed its emigres to come back to vote long before the right was codified in its constitution in 1600. Nowadays that provision favors left-wing parties, which are able to bus in working-class San Marinese living in Italy, France and Germany. The Christian Democrats reduced this advantage in 1958 by enacting a law permitting emigres living in the U.S. to vote by mail; that measure ensured the support of the many San Marinese who had grown relatively prosperous--and thus relatively conservative --on American soil.* Three years ago, however, a Communist coalition managed to repeal the law. With the opposition stripped of its U.S. mail-order vote, the Communists were hopeful of regaining the power they had enjoyed for twelve years after World War II.

The gambit failed. For one thing, the Christian Democrats were able to cut the leftist vote by warning that the Communists would turn the proud republic into "a Czechoslovakia." Even the importation of some 4,000 mostly leftist emigres by bus, train and taxi could not salvage the Communists' hopes. For another thing, there were those 450 safe votes flown in from the U.S., which helped the ruling coalition to hang on to all but one of the 39 seats that it was defending in the 60-man council. If the well-heeled Christian Democrats thought the airlift worth the $64,000 or more that it cost the party, so did the shuttle voters. Said Secondo Moretti, a Detroit bricklayer: "I'd travel twice as far as this to vote as long as they pay for it."

* The Supreme Court in 1967 upheld the U.S. citizen's right to vote in another country's election without jeopardizing his citizenship.

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