Our country's strength flows from its willingness to innovate and improve upon the American experiment in democracy. Recent presidential elections underscore the importance of revamping the way we register citizens to vote.

Currently, there are two widespread failures. First, our voter rolls are not clean and lead to uncertainty about voter fraud, such as people voting in two states and some places like Alaska having more registered voters than adults. Second, our voter rolls are not complete, with nearly a third of eligible voters--about 60 million Americans--not registered to vote. It's time to establish clean and complete voter rolls to preserve the integrity of elections and keep close elections in the hands of voters rather than judges.

Having so many unregistered citizens hurts voter turnout and causes great problems in elections. Under current laws, we naturally see major voter registration drives during election years. The result is a surge of registrations right before an election, leading to long lines at polling places, voters not receiving information about where to vote and turmoil over provisional and absentee ballots. It all too easily leads to potential partisan fraud such as a Republican-linked voter registration firm in Nevada allegedly throwing out forms collected from voters registering as Democrats and accusations of Democratic urban machines registering dead people to vote in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago. One inevitable downside is judges getting involved in deciding close elections by being forced to make decisions with transparent partisan consequences.

Pointing fingers and name-calling won't help us fix the problem. The way forward is to set a goal of 100 percent voter registration by establishing registration as a mutual responsibility of citizens and their government. It's the best way to bring together conservatives concerned about fraud in elections and liberals concerned about low voter registration. We need a coherent system that ensures all of us can vote, but none of us can vote more than once.

The United States in fact is the one of the few democracies where the government does not take responsibility for registering its voters, which is why by last January Iraq already had a higher share of its adult citizens registered to vote than the United State. The international norm is an orderly process of automatic voter registration of every citizen who reaches voting age. Because the government takes a proactive, ongoing role, registration occurs on a steady, rolling basis instead of in spurts tied to any specific election. Voters receive a unique identifier that ensures they don't vote more than once.

Not only does such a process provide nearly 100 percent voter registration, but it also leads to much cleaner voter rolls and less voter fraud. With comprehensive databases and full registration, there is no longer a question about who is or is not registered. Everyone is registered.

The most comprehensive way to establish universal registration would be to have states take the next step beyond the statewide voter registration databases they already should have in place in 2006 and establish a national database and federal standards for assuring 100 percent registration of eligible voters. We support such a change and believe it could be done, but acknowledge that it would mark a dramatic shift in how we run elections and would take serious attention to how to set up this database without violating civil liberties.

But we believe there are easier steps states and localities can take immediately that have almost no downsides. Our favorite proposal is the step of having all newly eligible voters registered and well-informed about their responsibilities as voters and the mechanics of how to vote in their community. Such people--both immigrants becoming citizens and young people becoming adults--would attend a short class on voting in their community, at the end of which they would register to vote.

Local and state elected officials and civic leaders are particularly interested in steps toward registering all high school students before they leave high school. New York City is an example of one city where all graduating seniors receive a voter registration card. We suggest, however, a more comprehensive process that has a goal of registering students well before they graduate along with a short civic curriculum about voting. Once these registrants become eligible to vote at 18, their registrations would become active automatically. They would receive a letter alerting them about their eligibility to vote, the location of their polling place, the date of the next election and their responsibilities when changing addresses.

A school district, or ideally a state, would make registering to vote a requirement for every high school student. This can be done in a variety of ways, either through a graduation requirement or a community service requirement. Most states currently allow 17-year-olds to register to vote as long as they will be 18-years-old by the next general election; therefore, this requirement would not require election administrators to process a significantly larger number of registrations than they are currently obligated to accept. Even if this registration system were accompanied by a lowering of the registration age in order to allow the program to reach a greater number of students who leave high school prior to graduation, it would not create a significant additional administrative version.

In fact, it would actually make the registration process more manageable for election officials. Each high school would designate an administrative staff member or members to serve as a registrar. The school would distribute registration forms to students and the registrar would collect completed forms and submit them to election officials in batches on set dates each year. With this recurring format, schools would be able to provide more consistent instructions for completing the forms and making future address changes than are currently provided. Registration forms filled out in this manner are also likely to be more accurate than forms filled out hurriedly at a shopping center or a crowded event.

At the same time, high school students would be introduced to the mechanics of voting in their community through one of several possible approaches, including some combination of: making it part of newly required civics curriculum for "Constitution Day"; mock elections on the local jurisdictions' voting equipment; and explanation about how to be a pollworker.

Over time, localities that adopt this system will register each person once and move closer to a complete voter roll. Once the Help American Vote Act -mandated statewide voter databases become operational, it may even become possible to automate the transfer of registration information from schools to election officials and simplify the administrative process even further.

Such changes would register far more young people in an orderly way and generate more understanding of the value of 100 percent registration. It would provide a means to introduce more young people to the importance of civic engagement because a natural complement to this policy would be a "voter's ed" curriculum for high school students, just as many have "driver's ed" now. Over time, as all 18-year-olds were registered to vote, the United States would move far closer to 100 percent voter registration.

Working with FairVote's Right to Vote Initiative, legislators and local elected officials in states like Hawaii, California, Illinois, Maryland and Rhode Island are preparing legislation for such high school registration programs. As we promise to export democracy abroad, we believe it critical to take care of business at home. Policymakers should establish a clear goal: clean and complete voter rolls.