Election Overhaul Is Urged

Seeking to overcome the flaws that brought election turmoil to Florida in 2000 and to Ohio last year -- and that cast doubt on the outcome nationally -- they are calling for election oversight to be removed from politicians and given to nonpartisan election professionals.

The former president, a Democrat, and the former secretary of State, a Republican, are the co-chairmen of the private Commission on Federal Election Reform, a 21-member bipartisan panel that spent five months studying the most pressing problems with the nation's electoral system. It follows on the work of a similar commission, led by Carter and former President Ford, that studied irregularities in the 2000 presidential race.

By urging greater professional and state involvement in running elections, the current panel would reverse more than 200 years of partisan and local control of elections while seeking to overcome what it called a "new and dangerous" belief among those on an election's losing side that the electoral process is now "unfair."

The recommendations run against "the tremendous vested interest of local election administrators" by moving control of elections "out of the hands of partisan, self-interested actors," said Richard Pildes, an expert on voting rights and election law at the New York University School of Law. He called the findings "extremely important."

Congressional action would be needed to implement some of the panel's 87 recommendations; states could enact others. The expected cost for all the recommendations would be $1.35 billion, the report said.

After Carter and Baker present the 91-page report to Bush and then to Congress, it will be posted at www.american.edu/Carter-Baker. The two men hope that some of their goals can be achieved before the 2008 presidential election.

"The American people are losing confidence in the system, and they want electoral reform," Carter said in a statement accompanying the report. He said the changes the commission had proposed "represent the best path toward modernizing our electoral system."