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.