WASHINGTON -- It was just a year ago last week that the Supreme Court elected George W. Bush our 43rd president. The mess of the elections in 2000, from the faulty voting machines in Florida to the long counts in western states (remember it took almost a month to declare a winner in the Senate election in Washington), the imperfections of the American election machinery were hung out for everyone to see. There was an immediate outcry to "Do Something!"

Well, last week Congress began to do something. The House of Representatives finally passed a bill to overhaul the system, to install some national standards and to pump some badly needed funds into upgrading the voting systems. A bipartisan group of senators moved the next day to support a strong bill that Democratic majority leader Tom Daschle says he will have up for votes on the Senate floor in January. Progress is happening, at last.

The parties have differing views on election reform, just as they do on taxes, health care and everything else. The Democrats are anxious to make it easier to vote. the unwashed masses support their philosophies, they believe. The Republicans want to make it harder to commit fraud. But their differences on elections should be easy to resolve. The two basic premises from which they start are not mutually exclusive. Everybody wants to protect the basic integrity of the elections, and they think that the federal government needs to move in to help guarantee that.

The whole issue of states rights in electoral matters is still a factor, but it seems to be hindering genuine national voting standards less. Since the founding of the republic, elections have been a local matter -- delegated to the states and by them to the administration of local officials. But the states want financial support for new election systems and technology. Their reluctance to accept standards as a cost of doing business with the federal government is waning.

The two bills are not too far apart. The House puts up a nice chunk of change to improve local voting equipment and procedures -- a total of $2.65 billion. This is the key ingredient in the mix. As much as the citizens clamor for reform, though, spending on such administrative niceties competes with other priorities in the states. With the economy down and spending on security up, the tight squeezes for education and other state priorities tends to push electoral equipment out of the budgets.

The Senate bill gets more into the nitty-gritty of reform. States would be required to offer provisional ballots and make computerized voter lists accessible in polling places by the 2004 election. Technology that enables voters to correct "under votes" (ballots with no candidate selected) and "over votes" (more than one candidate) would be required by the 2006 midterm elections.

Americans want a federal overhaul of elections to correct the patchwork system that offers varying degrees of reliability from state to state. In a national election, ballots in one state should not face a significantly higher probability of not getting counted than ballots in another. And nobody wants fraudulent voters making our decisions for us. The final measure is likely to include requiring identification checks for first-time voters who did not register in person. Making it easier to vote and harder to cheat now becomes the Senate's bipartisan cause.

Few if any of these reform measures will be in place before the 2002 elections. Some of the money may get out to the states to replace those dreaded punch card machines that hang chads, but the reforms are designed to be in place for the next presidential election in 2004 -- about time, I would say.