Ensuring Ballot Integrity

Last month's report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker deserves serious attention. The commission makes recommendations that would greatly improve our elections. The commission's boldest call is for universal voter registration, a practice used by many democracies around the world in which all eligible voters are automatically registered to vote. Universal registration would add more than 50 million unregistered Americans--nearly three in 10 eligible voters, disproportionately young and low-income--to our voter rolls.

But the devil is in the details, and the commission fails to lay out a clear plan for how to ensure that all eligible voters are registered and it shies away from a national system. But if implemented fully, universal voter registration would be one of the single most important government civil-rights actions since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Other commission recommendations respond directly to problems in our recent elections worth noting.

In the wake of presidential races in which secretaries of state in Florida and Ohio made controversial decisions affecting tightly fought national races, the commission calls for using nonpartisan election officials. This would help rid our elections of the appearance of political bias and might dissuade actual fraud.

Heeding a rising tide of activism in some states founded on mistrust of the privately owned voting equipment companies that supply elections, the commission calls for a paper audit trail that can be verified by each voter.

Challenging the majority view of the National Association of Secretaries of State that voted in February to restore what essentially amounted to the pre-2000 decentralized regime for administering elections, commissioners call for ongoing federal election funding and a strong Election Assistance Commission.

The commission supports overhauling the presidential primary schedule. The current system is absolutely bankrupt, with states chaotically advancing their primaries in the hope of gaining candidate attention--but collectively making it even more likely that Iowa and New Hampshire will be the only states that matter.

True, most of these proposals won't transform politics. In addition, as part of a trade-off to secure bipartisan support for policies designed to increase voter rolls, the report recommends problematic measures to prevent vote fraud.

Absentee voters need only sign their ballot to prove validity, for example, while voters at the polls would have to present a photo ID. And although the commission recommends that IDs be free, states may seek to charge fees and other practical barriers that would be tantamount to a poll tax--as a federal court recently found Georgia did with its new voter ID law.

The commission in general falls short by failing to establish a national system. There is no doubt that some states will abuse these recommendations, jumping to require photo IDs while not registering all eligible voters.

But Americans are increasingly fed up with both major parties, and efforts to block reasonable steps toward free and fair elections could be political folly.