A commission headed by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford this week presented a blueprint for election reform to avoid a repeat of the embarrassing debacle the world’s leading democracy suffered in the 2000 elections. President Bush gave his qualified blessing to the report, endorsing its key principles but stopping short of embracing the entire package.

The issue the president and Congress must resolve before much-needed reform can advance is the federal role in what has traditionally been state turf and, once that role is defined, whether reform should come through the carrot of financial inducement or the stick of mandates.

Legislation based upon the commission’s work is expected to be taken up this fall. The first task for lawmakers will be to separate the wide-ranging recommendations into two piles: necessities and frills. Necessities are those recommendations aimed at producing fair and honest elections. It is now known that as many as 6 million voters last November, in Florida and elsewhere, were victims of shoddy or abusive polling-place practices; they were either denied their right to vote or had their ballots not counted.

Nothing is more offensive to the very concept of democracy than for a legally entitled voter to be denied a ballot. Remedies proposed by the commission include statewide registration, so a citizen can register anywhere and have the information relayed to his or her precinct, and provisional ballots, so a ballot can be cast and counted later when the registration dispute is resolved.

On the question of counting, the commission did not endorse a certain type of voting machine but only suggested that states set performance standards and measure how well jurisdictions meet those standards. One necessary standard should be immediate feedback to the voter on the validity of the ballot and the ability to correct one improperly completed, a protection now best provided by the optical-scanner machines such as are used in Maine.

Frills are those recommendations aimed in increasing voter participation. Making Election Day a national holiday might improve turnout, but in the absence of any real evidence that people don’t vote because don’t have time, this would be an expensive and, given the extent to which current holidays are not observed, counterproductive hunch.

Likewise, the recommendations that TV

networks voluntarily withhold projections until the polls close on the West Coast or that Congress order the embargo of results until that time are of dubious value and constitutionally questionable.

The commission should not be faulted for producing such varied recommendations; broadness was its intent. It is the job of Congress and the president to focus upon the most important issues – the amount of time they spend in the coming days talking about registration reform as opposed to creating a new holiday will be a good indication of how sharp their focus is.

Expect, too, a lot of talk about whether the federal government should order the states to reform election practices or whether it should merely provide financial incentives to states wishing to reform. States’ rights always generate vigorous debate in Congress; in this case, the debate will be sorely lacking if it doesn’t include the states’ wrongs that led to the embarrassing debacle last fall.