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California voters move in mysterious ways. On Tuesday night, they inexplicably voted for a governor that has been plagued by corruption, and then turned around and rejected a proposition that would have plagued our voting system with corruption.

Of course the dichotomy makes little sense. But if Californians weren’t going to dump Gray Davis, they did the next best thing by defeating Proposition 52, a measure that would have made the state’s voting system a soft target for voter fraud.

The proposition aimed to increase voter participation by allowing same-day voter registration. Proponents of the measure argued its passage would have made the registration process more convenient, particularly for highly mobile segments of the population such as college students.

But while Proposition 52’s heart was in the right place, its mind was somewhere else – and this was not lost on Californians. If passed, the measure would have opened the floodgates for fraud by accepting easily forgeable forms of identification for registration (such as utility bills and lease agreements). And even more problematic, the measure provided no way of separating fraudulently cast votes from their legitimate counterparts.

So despite the worthy ideal of instant registration, Proposition 52’s version just wasn’t ready for prime time. Californians were not willing to trade electoral integrity for convenience. But more than that, Californians recognized that lackluster voter turnout has less to do with registration rules and more to do with apathy.

Indeed a segment of the nation’s population simply has no interest in exercising its right to vote, regardless of how convenient voting becomes.

A poll by the Rock the Vote organization indicates that young voters particularly fit this mold, as a quarter of 18- to 24-year-olds could not identify one of the major presidential candidates in the 2000 election; 70 percent were dumbfounded when asked to identify the vice-presidential candidates. Far more identifiable was the entire cast of “Friends.”

In light of these statistics, a 32 percent turnout in the youth demographic doesn’t seem so horrendous. A strong case can be made that the rate is even respectable in the middle of the of the MTV generation, where a youth culture that puts “Jackass” at the top of the movie box office appears to have less and less in common with conventional political culture.

Apathy goes deeper than voting regulations, and as such it is no surprise that band-aid measures like Proposition 52 have done little to spur voter turnout throughout the rest of the country. Instant-registration laws, motor voter laws, progressive absentee laws and early voting laws have not resulted in the participation spike their backers had hoped for.

So unless a novel approach comes along, voter apathy is a problem that is not going away anytime soon. And as much as Americans hate the idea of an individuals not taking advantage of their right to vote, it is not justifiable to take drastic measures by shortsightedly reforming the voting system.

Yet this is exactly what Proposition 52 attempted to do. Despite good intentions, the proposition would have done little to increase voter participation and a great deal to undermine electoral credibility. Thankfully, California voters were savvy enough to vote it down.

Eisner writes every Thursday in Viewpoint.