Reform of
Voting System Loses Steam on Capitol
Hill
By
JACKIE
CALMES
THE
WALL
STREET
JOURNAL, March
28, 2001
ATLANTA -- Nearly five months after the disputed
Florida election exposed serious problems in the
nation's voting systems, a bipartisan commission
seeking reforms finally got down to work.
But meanwhile, Republican and Democratic House
leaders on Capitol Hill were poised to pull the
plug on their own promised election-reform task
force -- after finding bipartisanship hard to come
by. And as the sparse attendance attested Monday at
the first hearing of an independent panel whose
co-chairman are former presidents Jimmy Carter and
Gerald Ford, election reform has also lost some of
its vogue.
To be sure, some cities, counties and states
are moving ahead with their own reforms. Here,
Georgia is considering replacing its welter of
local systems with more statewide uniformity. But
the passage of time since the 2000 election has
removed the sense of urgency in many places,
especially Congress, while lingering bad feelings
between the parties have poisoned discussion.
Meanwhile, President Bush is pushing for tax cuts
and other priorities; election reform isn't on his
agenda.
"Back in December, everybody had the torch lit"
for national voting changes, says Tony Sirvello,
Houston's administrator of elections. "That torch
is not burning as brightly anymore."
Mr. Carter remains hopeful his commission will
reignite the issue, and also bridge the political
impasse when it offers its recommendations to
Congress and the president by September. "My hope
is that our voice might be kind of a compromise
voice," he said during a break in the hearing at
his Carter Center.
Scholars,
Ex-Officeholders
The panel's first hearing came between the
former president's trips earlier this month to
Guyana and next month to Peru -- the sort of
countries whose elections he is more accustomed to
observing. The commission, sponsored by the New
York-based nonprofit research institution Century
Foundation and the University of Virginia's Miller
Center of Public Affairs, also includes 17 scholars
and former officeholders, including senators,
congressmen and cabinet secretaries, though
several, including Mr. Ford, missed Monday's
hearing.
President Bush, meanwhile, has been mostly
silent on election reform. He fears a replay of the
Florida fight in Congress, and some Democrats,
especially black caucus members who believe many
black voters were disenfranchised, want nothing
less. But "the administration is very well aware of
us, and encouraging of us," says the Carter-Ford
commission's executive director, historian Philip
Zelikow.
For major reforms to have much chance of being
enacted, though, Congress must have a role in
developing them and a stake in their success. And
while the Carter-Ford effort has a luminous roster,
"We've got no authority," conceded commission
member Bob Michel, a former House Republican
leader.
Dozens of election-reform bills have
been filed in the House and Senate, many
calling for a bipartisan commission that includes
lawmakers and White House representatives. None has
yet been acted on. In the closely divided Senate,
GOP leaders have put off plans to take up
election-reform proposals this month because of the
press of other issues.
Discord Over Makeup
Late last year, House Speaker Dennis Hastert
(R., Ill.) said he would name a bipartisan House
task force, but Republican and Democratic leaders
haven't been able to agree on its makeup:
Republicans insist on a one-seat majority;
Democrats want an even split. The speaker and
Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D., Mo.) are due
to decide this week whether to give up.
Rep. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), a congressional
liaison to President Bush, is slated to be chairman
of the effort if it ever gets off the ground. For
now, though, he was simply a witness at the hearing
here, speaking on "legislative strategy" for
enacting election reforms and facing questions
about the lack of one in Congress. "Feelings have
rubbed a little raw from the last election," he
told the Carter-Ford panel. If Congress creates no
special commission of its own, Mr. Blunt added,
"the recommendations of a commission like yours
will even be more important."
The commission will consider a range of issues
raised last fall: the states' confusing mix of
polling times, as well as technology, ballot
designs, accessibility for the disabled, voter
registration and absentee voting. Also, they will
address whether the federal government, for the
first time in history, might help states foot the
bill for conducting elections. The commission will
hold further hearings at Ronald Reagan's
presidential library in California, Lyndon
Johnson's in Texas, and Mr. Ford's in Michigan.
For all its civility, the Carter Center event
exposed some of the fault lines in the
debate. On the question of federal aid, Mr.
Michel said, "I don't know how there's that much
money to make an impact," and he fretted that the
promise of it, meanwhile, would "inhibit the states
to move now" on their own. Other panelists clashed
over whether the federal government should impose
its own requirements attached to the money.
Among witnesses, Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R., Ark.),
sponsor of a bill to provide $1.5 billion toward
local election costs, hailed his state's recent
move toward new optical-scan voting systems, in
which ballots are read by tallying machines similar
to those used to grade standardized tests. But
Georgia Secretary of State Cathy Cox, who prefers
electronic systems similar to the touch-screens on
bank automated teller machines, said her office
found large error rates in Georgia counties with
optical-scan systems.
Such differences, in a nation where nearly
4,000 counties and thousands more towns are
responsible for elections, suggest the hurdles
facing Mr. Carter in pursuing his goal of a uniform
national system for federal elections. He says he
doesn't expect much change by next year's
congressional elections, but perhaps by 2004 and
the next presidential race.
"It's not only conservatives who don't want the
voter lists to expand. I say almost every incumbent
member of the Congress or state legislatures
doesn't want to see the voter lists expanded," Mr.
Carter said, suggesting he won't shrink this year
from being the scold who prods the lawmakers.
"Because they want to protect the particular
constituency that put them in office and keeps them
in office."
He recalled his own futile idea, as president
two decades ago, to encourage the young to vote by
authorizing high-school principals to be voting
registrars. He says his own party, led by the late
House Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill (D., Mass.),
stopped his idea cold.
"I found out I was running into a stone wall,"
he said. "They didn't want in the heart of Boston,
[to] see 13,000 new Hispanics registered to
vote, because they had no way to anticipate how
those newly registered voters would choose their
leader. And they might very well choose somebody
else."
Write to Jackie Calmes at jackie.calmes@wsj.com
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