I come here today at the request of former President Carter, and as a person who has spent the past fifteen years organizing the international observation of elections in twenty countries, including the United States. Last year, I was asked to organize the observation of elections in Mexico and in the United States, and the truly implausible occurred. I'm not talking about the first time Mexico's governing party was defeated in a Presidential election. More startling than that, Mexico conducted an election in which all the parties immediately accepted the results, and that didn't happen in the U.S.

In 1992, at the Carter Center, I invited a group of Mexicans to observe the U.S. presidential election. They were surprised at the decentralization of the electoral system, the impact of private campaign contributions, the laxness in identifying voters, the inadequacy of the registration list, and the fact the media could announce results before Americans on the west coast could vote. Foreign observers knew there were problems, but most Americans did not acknowledge them until last November.

The United States has been an inspiration for dozens of new democracies, but while many of them have experimented with new ways to conduct elections, we have taken our electoral institutions for granted for too long. This Commission provides a needed stimulus to rejuvenate our democratic traditions and electoral institutions. We can learn a lot from other nations' practices, but we do not need to replicate them. There are many cases from which to draw lessons, and so let me try to summarize some of what we know from other experiences and then propose ways to adapt them to the special conditions and traditions of the United States.

I. How do we compare with other democracies?

1. Dysfunctional Decentralization. Neither I nor my former colleagues at The Carter Center are aware of any other democratic country in the world that has as decentralized a national electoral process - where a county can design the presidential ballot - as the United States. Almost all the countries where we observed elections had a central authority for conducting national elections.
   


2. National Election Commission. Over the past two decades, National Election Commissions have been established in most of the new democracies and many of the older ones. Some of these Commissions have evolved through three stages. First, they are extensions of a political party or the incumbent government. In response to pressure from the internal opposition and the international community, some NECs then became bipartisan or multi-partisan, but these Commissions have a tendency to stalemate or collude to protect themselves. The most advanced stage occurs when NECs become nonpartisan institutions that are autonomous of the political parties and the Executive Branch of the Government. The Federal Election Institute in Mexico (IFE) passed through all three stages in the last 12 years. Unlike almost all other Commissions, the U.S. Federal Election Commission is not responsible for the conduct of elections, but its bipartisan composition and stalemated behavior suggests that it is in the second stage.
   


3. Registration, Identification, and Voting Participation. In comparison to virtually all advanced democracies and to most others in the developing world, the United States registers one of the lowest percentage of its eligible voters, has one of the weakest, porous systems for identifying voters, and has one of the two lowest levels of voter participation, particularly among youth. In few countries do people move as often as they do in the United States - roughly one-sixth of the population moves each year, but our registration systems can't keep up. You'll recall that the Secretary of State of Oregon in the hearing in Los Angeles acknowledged that they mail ballots, but have not done any studies to determine what percentage of the ballots reach the designated citizen. We also heard from officials in California that the state is "precluded from asking for identification" of citizenship. Let me offer some more specific comparisons with our neighbors and a few other countries.
   
   
   • Registration. In comparison to the 55% of eligible voters registered in the United States, both Canada and Mexico registers more than 95 percent of its eligible voters. Many countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Caribbean countries register voters by going door-to-door, much as we do our census, and they review the data regularly. Mexico audited its registration list 36 times between 1994-2000.
   
   
   • Regarding identification cards, Mexico printed at substantial expense, a state-of-the-art voter identification card - with color photo, magnetic strip, and fingerprints - and its registration list also has photos. Peru has an identification card with a color photo and a digitized thumbprint, which is issued when a person reaches voting age. Indeed, virtually every country in the world has a better system for identifying voters at the polling site than the United States.
   
   
   • Voter Participation. Almost every country has its election on a holiday or a Sunday. More than 30 nations even require their citizens to vote, but only six - Australia, Belgium, Cyrpus, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Peru - enforce the law. In Peru, a citizen cannot cash a check if he or she did not vote until paying a fine of $35.
   
   


4. Polling Officials. In Mexico, IFE chose its polling officials by random
   selection from the voters' list in each precinct. The names were then winnowed down based on education, and then the citizens were trained to conduct the election. This increased citizens' involvement in the election, and it also improved the quality of administration. Several other countries have adopted a comparable system, but in some, like Venezuela, some people did not show up on the day of the election. The lesson is to recruit a larger number of citizens to be sure enough are available on election day.
   


5. Machinery and Recounts. Brazil and Costa Rica have employed a touch-screen voting system, which had some problems initially, but are reportedly doing well. Jamaica began to install one, but the costs and the reliability were so questionable that they abandoned it. In Venezuela, they installed the first nationally integrated electronic vote totalling system, but confidence eroded because the machines were not properly maintained, and they had high, unexplained null votes. In brief, the machinery of elections is nowhere perfect; there are no obvious technological fixes. In Jamaica, after an election, the Commission reviews the invalid ballots and prepares a guidebook for future elections on how to interpret marks on the ballot that don't fit exactly in the box.
   


6. Campaign Finance/Access to Media. Virtually every country that we consider democratic sets limits on campaign contributions and provides free access to the media for candidates and parties. In no democracy do private campaign contributions reach the magnitude - $3 billion in 2000 - that they do in the United States. In a survey of 59 democratic countries, there were a wide range of restrictions on corporate contributions, paid political advertising, and foreign contributions - with about 10-35% of the countries banning all three, 7-17% partially banning them, and 47-75% allowing them. But the study also found that after a major scandal, most countries approve new rules to restrict these contributions. [Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, "International IDEA Campaign Finance Reform Project] One other path that some governments use to limit campaign contributions and expenditures is to limit the length of the campaign and to set restrictions on when advertising and fund-raising would be permitted.
   

II. What lessons should we draw from the comparison? With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to try to adapt some of the lessons that could be drawn from abroad to the U.S. experience and offer some ideas for the National Commission to consider as it begins to draft its report.

1. Balancing Federal and State Authority. Wherever one decides to draw the line between federal and state authority on elections, that is much less of a problem than the fact that states have devolved their authority to as many as 10,000 counties and municipalities. That, as we saw last year, is a recipe for chaos. The Commission might want to consider as its first recommendation to encourage states to retrieve the authority that they devolved to municipalities and counties in conducting elections, and transfer the responsibility for elections from the Secretaries of State to autonomous and nonpartisan State Election Commissions (SEC). These SECs would ensure uniformity of machines, standards, and recounting, and they would maintain a state-wide registration list. Several states, notably Georgia, Florida, and Minnesota have begun to move in this direction and should be commended for that.
   


2. National Commission. The Ford-Carter Commission might want to recommend the establishment of a National Election Commission (NEC), which would come to be viewed like the Federal Reserve Bank, as a nonpartisan group of distinguished leaders, whose voices on democratic and electoral issues would be sought and would have a positive influence on the political debate. We are fortunate that Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Chief Electoral Officer of Elections Canada, is here to explain his work, as I believe Canada, because of its federal system, could be a good model for the United States. The U.S. NEC could propose standards for the states to maintain comparable registration lists that could be tied to a central computer. When voters move from one state to another, their registration would shift accordingly. The NEC could fulfill other responsibilities as well - including monitoring the fairness, inclusiveness, and legality of voting and elections and proposing changes to Congress and the public. It could also absorb the work of the present Federal Election Commission on supervising the campaign finance system and with a non-partisan Board, the chances are that it would have more leverage with Congress to improve its capacity to enforce those laws.
   


3. Identification, Engagement and Participation. Our goals are to have an electoral system that is both more inclusive and more resistant to fraud - one in which more citizens will register and vote while assuring that only citizens vote and that they vote only once. This could be done by providing a secure "Citizenship Card" with a photo and a magnetic strip to every American citizen. In their senior year, all students would be required to take a "civic education" course that included information on how to vote and also how to conduct an election. At the end of the course, students, who are citizens, would receive the card, which would take effect on their 18th birthday, and that card would provide permanent registration. Each time they moved to a new apartment or house, they would swipe their card in a machine - similar to the ones that verify credit cards - administered by the real estate agent or an official. That machine would connect with the NECs national registration list and transfer the registration to the new place of residency. The machine would also give the voter a receipt with the new polling place site. All citizens above the age of 18 and all naturalized citizens would apply for the card. Proof of citizenship would be required.
   
   Like similar proposals for national identification cards, this one would generate opposition from groups that fear the reduction of privacy or the expansion of the federal government. This is not the place to review the arguments for and against such a card - except to say that there are very few democracies in the world that would contemplate a fair election without ensuring that its citizens were properly registered and identified. We do not have such a system at this time.
   


4. Polling Officials. The expense of hiring polling officials combined with the low level of training of many of them has created serious problems in elections that could be solved if we tried an alternative approach. Wherever I have monitored elections in the third world, I have found citizens genuinely excited about participating in elections - not just by voting but by conducting them. Their connection with the democratic process is always enhanced by that. Therefore, the Commission might want to propose that the job of conducting elections should be a "civic duty," like serving on juries or in the armed forces. As in Mexico, prior to each election, the precinct should randomly select a group of citizens, train them, and have them conduct the election. We can also require that as part of their civic education course, high school students observe the electoral process - from campaigns through the counting of the ballots.
   


5. Campaign Finance Reform/Access to the Media: Criteria. I know of the
   Commission's desire to avoid specific recommendations about campaign finance reform, and so I will not discuss them. But permit me to offer one idea about the issue and then pose a set of questions. First, one way to obviate the need for campaign contributions and also the need for such reform is to provide guaranteed access to the media. Second, is Canada less democratic for keeping its campaign costs so low? Is the United Kingdom less democratic for limiting campaign expenditures, banning political ads in national elections, and requiring the television to give candidates air-time?
   

***

Democracy is nowhere perfect; it is a work in progress - abroad and at home. The beauty of the spread of democratization throughout the world is that all countries can now learn from each other how to improve their democracies. Just as America has long been the model for emerging democracies so too can we now profit from their more recent experiences to modernize our own democracy.

____________

Robert A. Pastor is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Political Science at Emory University. From 1985-98, Dr. Pastor was a Fellow at the Carter Center and the Founding Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Program, the Democracy Program, and the China Local Elections Project. The author or editor of 14 books, including Democracy in the Americas, Dr. Pastor has combined a career of scholarship and foreign policy-making - in government as National Security Advisor on Latin America (1977-81) and in a non-governmental organization as a mediator of elections and conflicts. He has organized the international observation of elections in twenty countries, including the United States. Dr. Pastor is also President of Common Cause/Georgia and on the National Governing Board of Common Cause.

Robert A. Pastor
Department of Political Science
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Phone: 404-727-5959; [email protected]

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