BY SALLY ACHARYA

The nation came within 100,000 votes of a constitutional crisis in 2004, former President Jimmy Carter and others were told during the first hearing of the Commission on Federal Election Reforms at AU last week.

The 21-member commission is chaired by Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. Over the next six months, it will examine the state of the electoral process during two hearings held at AU and one each at the Carter Center in Atlanta and the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston.

Law professors, election officials, and civil rights advocates were among the experts who testified during the day-long session. “The U.S. came much closer to electoral meltdown, violence in the streets, and constitutional crisis than most people realize,” said election reform specialist Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School.

Commissioners heard allegations of fraud, vote suppression, and unequal access for the poor, second-language speakers, and people with disabilities. They also mulled such ideas as a federal holiday on election day to improve voter turnout, and listened to the pros and cons of technological solutions to electoral challenges.

One expert, Stanford professor of computer science David Dill, cautioned that “our democracy is too precious to entrust to ill-conceived and flawed technology.” He told the commissioners that “the real job of an election is not to convince the winners they won, but to convince the losers they lost.”

Dill added, “The advent of paperless electronic voting is moving us away from election transparency . . . Voters have no means to confirm that the machines have recorded their votes correctly, nor will they have any assurance that their votes won’t be changed later.”

One issue the Carter-Baker Commission is examining is how to create a “paper trail” with electronic voting machines to improve voter confidence in the machines, which are statistically more accurate than punch cards or lever machines.

Many states have such sloppy systems that “you cannot tell where incompetence ends and fraud begins,” charged John Fund, Wall Street Journal editorial board member and author of “Stealing Elections.” Fund recommended that photo identification be required for voters, but that states waive the fees for non-driver identifications to ensure that minorities and the poor who don’t drive are not disenfranchised.

He advised against a national voter card because it would spark a debate on other matters, such as privacy, that could distract the public from the issues and slow the process of enacting any changes. This prompted Carter to ask, “What you’re saying is you’re against it because other people would be against it?”

Questions of access are also being addressed by the Carter-Baker Commission. “Many people have alleged that these are a Republican-versus-Democrat pair of issues,” Carter said. It’s a widespread misimpression, he said, that “Democrats want everybody to vote whether they’re qualified or not, and Republicans want to restrict voting to exclude minorities and others not inclined to vote.” Added Baker, a Republican, “We want the widest possible access, consistent with voter integrity.”

Carter said it was crucial to learn why 40 percent of potential voters refrain from casting ballots. Four years ago he cochaired an election commission with former president Gerald Ford to recommend possible solutions to problems that emerged during the contested 2000 election. Some of its recommendations were included in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, but Carter and Baker both said that much needs to be done to improve the system.

“(HAVA) was an important achievement. But it is only a first step toward election reform, and it is a step that has not yet been completed,” said Kay Maxwell, president of the League of Women Voters.

“To avoid litigation, a close election requires an election administration system close to perfection; yet we are far from perfection,” added Hasen.

AU’s Center for Democracy and Election Management organized the meeting in Washington and will also host the September meeting when the commission makes it recommendations. “About two decades ago,” said AU vice president of International Affairs Robert Pastor, director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, “I recall a political leader saying the trend toward democracy around the world is inevitable—but that could change. This commission is here to ensure that will not change.”