With a presidential election on the horizon and with our country struggling to introduce democracy to Iraq, perhaps we should create a department dedicated to enhancing homeland democracy.

The state of democracy is not good. In the 2000 presidential election, only 51.3 percent of eligible citizens voted. In elections for Congress in non-presidential years, the turnout is typically much lower — just about a third of those eligible bother to vote. At the municipal levels, voter turnout seldom rises above single digits.

Is this any way to run a democracy?

Despite the aborted "partial birth" election we experienced in 2000, the country seems to have simply moved on to other things. As Bob Dole should say, but hasn't: Where's the outrage!

What can we do to enhance homeland democracy? The first step toward real reform is to embrace an important principle. We must ensure not only that we count every vote, but that every vote truly counts in America.

For every vote to count at the presidential level, we should consider a very attractive voting-system reform called "instant runoff voting." Under IRV, currently used to elect the president of Ireland and the mayor of London, voters simply rank the candidates in order of preference.

In the last presidential election, some left-leaning voters could have ranked Ralph Nader first and Gore second. On the right, many voters could have ranked Pat Buchanan first and George W. Bush second. Far better than our traditional winner-take-all system, IRV actually produces majority rule. What a concept! Instead of splitting their votes and handing the election to George Bush, with IRV the Nader-Gore voters in 2000 would have combined their votes, and Gore would have won the election handily with roughly 52 percent of the vote.

Under IRV, the ballot-count simulates a runoff. If a candidate wins an outright majority of first-preference votes, the count is over and that candidate wins the state. But if not, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and the ballots cast for that candidate are awarded to the voter's next choice. This simple change in the system would allow voters to vote affirmatively for their favorite candidate without wasting their vote outright or being a "spoiler" and handing the election to a candidate with whom they disagree strongly.

Using IRV would ensure that whoever wins all of a state's Electoral College votes receives at least a majority of the votes cast in that state. And right now, every state in the union is free to adopt IRV without amending the U.S. Constitution.

IRV could be used for legislative elections at all levels — local, state and federal. But we should also go beyond IRV for electing representative assemblies. We should reexamine our traditional winner-take-all voting system. Many of the world's mature democracies with extremely high voting-participation rates have opted for some variation on proportional voting methods. We should be willing to explore the full range of alternative voting systems.

Proportional voting systems using multi-member districts offer an elegant solution to our discredited redistricting process. Voters are able to select the representatives they want instead of the other way around. It truly is painful to watch the unbridled, partisan power-grabbing that goes on every 10 years following each national census. Let's call the redistricting process by its proper name: election fraud. It's cheating, pure and simple. Partisan redistricting is all about stuffing the ballot box before the election.

As we approach the 2004 elections, at a minimum we should take these two steps:

• Form a broadly representative, nonpartisan national commission to consider a full range of pro-democracy reforms. Even if its findings are not issued in time to produce real changes before the 2004 elections, the mere act of forming a pro-democracy commission will have a salutary effect on public perceptions. One place the commission should start is to examine what other countries do to achieve voter turnout rates of 80 percent to 90 percent.

• Make voting more convenient by voting on weekends or creating a national Election Day holiday. What's so magic about Tuesday?

It won't be easy to turn things around. Real reform never is. But continuing the status quo is not an option. Not at a time when our soldiers are fighting to introduce democracy to other countries. Democracy, like charity, should begin at home.