EXCERPT

The National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former presidents Carter and Ford, issued a report last summer with a series of recommendations for reforming the American electoral system. Many of the recommendations the Commission made were thereafter incorporated into the bills that have now passed the House and Senate. However, many other Commission recommendations were omitted from the bills and are worth considering for future legislation as we continue to try to strengthen the system. Moreover, there are items not sufficiently emphasized in either the bills or the recommendations of the Commission that ought to be considered for inclusion in the final legislation that comes out of the conference committee for the president�s signature. These include instituting basic minimum voter education procedures, ensuring that no jurisdiction loses an unacceptable number of votes for any reason in any given election, and election day registration. Finally, as The Century Foundation will describe in a series of forthcoming reports, there were again a multitude of election administration problems in the 2001 elections. This indicates that without expeditious federal action and federal money, many of the same controversies that plagued the 2000 election may well emerge again in the 2002 and 2004 elections to come.