Voter Reform

[strandinthewind]

Election Reformers Hand Report to Bush

Monday, September 19, 2005



WASHINGTON —

Former President Jimmy Carter (search) and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III (search) presented President Bush 87 recommendations on election reform Monday, including a free, nationalized voter identification program and paper verification of electronically cast votes.

"We think this report hopefully will go a long ways toward ending the sterile debate that we have in our politics about ballot integrity versus ballot access because many of the recommendations in this report move in both of those directions," Baker said shortly after the meeting.


To read the report, click here.


Carter said they next would present the recommendations to some of the key members of Congress. Carter and Baker are the co-chairs of the Commission on Federal Election Reform (search), which began its work in March and released its nine-section final report Monday.

Carter said the most controversial recommendation was likely the national identification program. Under the commission's recommendation, the identification would be free to keep from discriminating against the poor, and would be phased in through 2010.

Carter said one effect of the recommendation would be to correct the "horrible, discriminatory" law passed in his home state of Georgia. He said state law there charges $20 and $35 for 5- and 10-year voter registration cards, which "deliberately deprives, poor people, old people and others of the right to vote."

The recommendation would also make the identification process fair across all states, Carter said.

Baker and Carter said another recommendation would ask states to share voter registration lists to prevent double registration and other problems.

Another recommendation is to shift to a regional primary system of four presidential primaries, although they did not recommend ending the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary -- historically the first two barometers of political popularity for the party's presidential hopefuls. After the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the plan calls for four primaries at one-month intervals. The order in which regions voted would rotate every four years.

"We believe it's the best approach," Carter said.

After the legally challenged election of George W. Bush in 2000, voter worries spiked and in 2002 Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which allocated money to update voting systems and improve voter registration practices.

But there were more complaints last year after President Bush's reelection, especially in the battleground of Ohio. There were questions over voting machine access, electric vote total accuracy, and even where the voters were supposed to cast their ballots.

Among the commission's recommendations are:

— Congress should pass a law to require voter-verifiable paper audit trails on all electronic voting machines.

—The presidential primary system should be reorganized into four regional primaries, held after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. A regional primary would take place each month from March to June.

— All "legitimate domestic and international election observers" should be granted unrestricted access to the election process, within the rules of the election.

— News organizations should voluntarily refrain from projecting any presidential election results in any state until all polls have closed in 48 states, with Alaska and Hawaii excluded.

— States should prohibit senior election officials from serving or assisting others' political campaigns in a partisan way.

— States should establish uniform procedures for the counting of provisional ballots, which voters can use when there are questions about their registration.

Organizing the commission's work is the American University Center for Democracy and Election Management, in association with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, the Carter Center and Electionline.org.

FOX News' Greg Simmons and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,169762,00.html