PORTLAND – Do you want to give people permission to register to vote on Election Day, or leave things the way they are?

That’s the essential point of Question 1 on this year’s ballot. It is a People’s Veto which, if passed, would undo new legislation enacted this year that requires people to register to vote ahead of time, no later than the Thursday before Election Day.

The question has divided people in Maine. Opponents to same-day voter registration say the earlier registrations help prevent voter fraud, while supporters say banning same-day registration makes it needlessly harder for voters to perform their civic duty.

“This is about making sure that every eligible voter in Maine has the opportunity to vote,” said David Farmer, a spokesman for the Protect Maine Votes/Yes on 1, a campaign initiative regarded as a principal supporter of the veto.

Same-day registration, Farmer said, has been on the books for the past 40 years, and should be credited with high voter participation numbers.

“Why should you change a law that’s worked for 40 years?” he said.

In last year’s elections, Farmer said, Maine had the highest voter participation rate in the country, and 20,000 people registered to vote on Election Day. For the last presidential election in 2008, he said, 50,000 people registered to vote on Election Day in Maine.

The new rules, Farmer said, force people to register no later than the Thursday before Election Day. In some rural communities, he said, limited town clerk office hours may mean some voters would have to register even earlier than that.

“It makes it harder to register,” he said. “It absolutely has an impact.”

Opponents of same-day registration argue that no one is trying to make it harder to register. Maine House Speaker Robert Nutting was a principal sponsor of the legislation enacted this summer to ban same-day registration, and said his only motive is to prevent voter fraud.

“I think it’s important that everybody has an opportunity to vote just once, and only that people eligible to vote may vote,” he said.

Nutting noted that 42 other states have similar bans in place on same-day registration, including California, which recently attempted a repeal and failed.

“People didn’t want others to register and vote on the same day,” he said.

Nutting also cited a report issued by Secretary of State Charlie Summers on Sept. 21, detailing findings of an investigation into various allegations of voter fraud in 2010. Nutting said Summers found “a substantial number of errors” that could be corrected by eliminating same-day registration.

A statement by Summers summarizing the report indicates there were cases of mistakes and possible voter fraud. The investigation, he said, covered less than 1 percent of the 972,000 registered voters in Maine. Among his findings, six people were registered to vote who were not American citizens, 77 college students were simultaneously registered to vote in Maine and another state, and of those college students, five had voted in both states in the same year, but not in the same elections.

Summers did not directly comment on whether same-day registration should be allowed in his Sept. 21 statement. He noted that of all the “potential voter fraud” cases he found, 84 percent of the cases were due to “clerical error,” and 79 percent involved people who registered on Election Day.

In addition, Summers’ report indicates several cases of attorneys who went to polling places on Election Day and “badgered clerks into accepting registration cards they were unsure of and intimidating them to the point they simply process the registration as is – without first calling the state’s election office for guidance.”

Ben Grant, chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, said the report ultimately came up with only a small amount of actual violations, and should not be used as an excuse to ban same-day registrations.

“They uncovered virtually no problems,” he said.

Grant, who called the ban on same-day registration “a solution in search of a problem,” said the ban would definitely prevent people from voting.

“That was the intent of the law to begin with,” he said. “I don’t think that’s a direction we ought to be going.”

Charlie Webster, chairman of the Maine Republican Party, denied the ban was designed to stop people from voting, and said that allegation makes an insulting assumption about the voting public’s tolerance for the inconvenience of registering ahead of time.

“That’s what they’re saying,” he said. “People aren’t smart enough. They’re too lazy.”

Webster said the state has to ensure that people will not vote more than once, which can happen if there is no inspection period between registration and Election Day. It doesn’t matter, he said, how small the number of fraud cases is.

“If one person does it, it’s too much, “ he said. “It’s really about common sense. There’s simply no way to guarantee that people aren’t going to vote twice.”