If you’re looking for fat chance reforms, here are some more from the two Jimmies and their commission:

To turn back the primary stampede in March which Carter set in motion a quarter-century ago (though the report doesn’t put it that way), they want the parties to create a system of monthly regional primaries, rotating the order every four years. If the parties fail to do as told, the commission wants Congress to make them. This has been a hardy perennial at academic conclaves for decades past. It’s been brushed off again and again by both parties, which will go on doing so until long after the electoral college, one way or another, is dead and buried.

A week after the commission spoke, a Democratic task force on the calendar ranked regional primaries last among possible alternatives to the current system, as Republicans have essentially done repeatedly in the past. To suggest that the Republicans and Democrats who occupy all but two of the 535 seats in Congress would impose such a thing on their parties when neither of their national organizations wants any part of it defies even academic reason. Neither the two Jimmies nor the national parties, to be sure, want any part of the national primary that voters say they want.

Another perennial “reform” with no known constituency outside the academic think tanks is encouraging television networks to provide free “five minutes of candidate discourse” every night in the final thirty days of a campaign. CBS News, where I used to work, actually sort of did this a few cycles back (it was four minutes—two to each candidate) and undoubtedly had remotes clicking all across the land in consequence. By far, the least interested participants were the campaigns themselves—it was a daily hassle getting them to make the candidates available.

Perhaps the most out-to-lunch proposal (though another long-time staple of the academic lecture circuit) is getting the networks to stop projecting winners until all the polls have closed in the west. Did no one on the commission look at television or the internet last election night? The problem that bothered everyone was not the networks declaring when the polls closed in, say, Ohio at 7:30, that Kerry had carried the state (they did nothing of the sort until nearly noon the next day) but the posting in mid-afternoon of numbers construed as indicating he had done so by freebooters such as Matt Drudge, Slate, and Wonkette.

There is, to be sure, in “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” page after page of sound advice on eliminating obstacles to voting for the less fortunate, or creating them for those who have no business doing so. More efficient registration files, provisional ballots, paper trails on electronic voting machines, federal funding so state and local governments won’t have to bear all the cost of making federal elections more credible—all that good stuff. As often as not, the recommendations are expansions on or calls for better implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

By far the most controversial has been a proposal to provide photo ID cards for voters who don’t have drivers’ licenses—more often than not, presumably, voters who are less well-off than those who do. The Jimmies point out that in the twenty-four states which already have such a requirement, their proposals would provide the ID free of charge. Critics argue that the commission would extend a practice they don't like in half the country to the rest of it.

But all this focus on how to make sure every vote counts only bring us back to the issue which the commission from the very outset refused to address. Virtually all the argument about impediments to voting last November and thereafter has had to do with Ohio. One hundred thirty-seven thousand qualified voters would need to have been effectively inhibited from voting, and all of them would have had to have been Kerry supporters, for it to have made a difference in who is president today. That’s the only basis on which anyone could have any lack of confidence in the election, and there is, of course, not the slightest possibility of anything approaching that to have occurred.

But suppose, just suppose, that Kerry had gotten those extra votes in Ohio. He would be president today—though over three million more Americans would have voted for Bush. For the second time in a row, the country’s second choice would have become its fully empowered leader. Now that would have been, for Americans, the grounds for a drop-dead crisis of confidence in their democracy.  Having taken the electoral college off the table in their own country, the two Jimmies and their academic center/institutes can now go back to tutoring emerging nations and holding seminars on how they can do better.

Martin Plissner joined the CBS News Election unit in 1963 and became the network's political editor and later executive political director from 1970 through 1996. He is the author of The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Elections.

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