Carter-Baker commission examines evidence for federal election reform

Carter-Baker commission examines evidence for federal election reform

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

How can maximum voter registration and participation in federal elections without fraud be achieved?

What can be done to ensure that people who vote have confidence in the voting procedure and that the system can be checked for accuracy and integrity if questions are raised?

How can the federal election system be reformed on a bipartisan basis so that the political parties, Congress, the president and the general public agree in general on which changes to make?

These are basic questions that the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform hopes to address when it delivers a report to President George W. Bush and Congress in September.

The private, bipartisan 21-member commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III listened to testimony from experts in academia and election officials during a hearing June 30 at Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

Rice University President David W. Leebron is also a member of the commission, which will consider testimony from the hearing at Rice and a previous hearing at the American University in Washington when preparing its final report.

“One of the things that concern us is the lack of uniformity within states,” Carter said during a news conference after the hearing at Rice. “In effect, we have about 4,400 different election authorities. That is almost all the counties and no precincts — they have their individual authority.”

Baker, honorary chair of the Baker Institute, noted that the commission has twin considerations: ballot access and ballot integrity. “One of the things that we’re looking at is the absence of registration databases in the various states that are interoperable,” he said. Ideally, the commission would like to avoid federalizing the nation’s election process but still arrive at a consensus on how states can exchange information so that a voter who moves to another state cannot vote twice but also will not be denied the opportunity to vote just because they were registered in a different state.

The Carter-Baker Commission hopes to complement the work done after the 2000 election by the Carter-Ford National Commission on Election Reform, which played a role in Congress’ passing the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002.

Carter said the provisional ballot process implemented by HAVA allowed a vote to be counted later if it was cast from a place where the voter was not qualified to vote, but that provision has been interpreted differently in different parts of individual states. “To make that more uniform would be very good,” he said.

Carter also advocated making the voting process “more pleasant, more attractive, more accommodating” to increase the number of people who participate in the elections. “Now it’s very difficult to know exactly where to register,” he said. “It’s very difficult for people who live overseas. It’s very difficult for students to be able to vote. And the voting registration process quite often is quite varied among the states.”

Two Rice faculty members were among the experts who testified during the hearing at the Baker Institute. Robert Stein, dean of social sciences and the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science, examined who votes, who doesn’t, and why, and he recommended the use of “voting centers” on and before Election Day to make voting more convenient and accessible to a larger number of people. Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering, reviewed the pros and cons of electronic voting machines and registration systems and recommended the precinct-based optical scan as the best voting system and stressed the need for a voter-verifiable paper trail.

In addition to sessions on voter registration, identification and participation and voting technology, the commission heard testimony on election management and election reform. The commission will meet privately in August at The Carter Center in Atlanta to discuss the various issues and prepare its report.

“We’re going to come up with what we think are the right recommendations and we’re going to put them up there and see if anybody runs them up the flagpole,” Baker said. “We intend to make our recommendations without regard to whether or not there is today feeling on the part of Congress that they want to deal with it this year. We understand the fact that they’ve just done this, that they may not have any real stomach for dealing with the very difficult issues of federal election reform this year or even next.”

Carter expressed optimism that the work of the commission, whose executive director is Robert Pastor of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, will be useful to Congress.

“There’s already a substantial amount of interest in the Congress on election reform,” Carter said, adding that well over a dozen major bills are currently being considered by Congress. “To put all of the recommendation premises in one package as we intend to do in September might help to encourage Congress to take action earlier and more definitively than they would have otherwise.”