The debacle of the 2000 presidential election made it clear that we are operating a badly frayed nineteenth-century democracy in twenty-first-century America. Voter participation is shockingly low and declining each year. At best only one-half the eligible electorate actually votes in a presidential election. Turnout for Senate and House elections in nonpresidential years rarely exceeds 40 percent. Local participation is even lower. And on the whole, those who actually vote are richer, whiter, and better educated than those who don't.

Our techniques of registration and voting are mired in the distant past. Almost no effort is made to use advanced technology and modern procedures to increase the base of registered voters or to make voting more convenient. Voting machinery is badly outdated, and there are blatant inequalities in the distribution of up-to-date voting technology. An unacceptably high percentage of the ballots in any given election are not accurately counted--especially in poor and minority areas. We disenfranchise large numbers of citizens, heavily male and minority, on the basis of youthful criminal behavior, further increasing the electoral gap between rich and poor. The very process of choosing a president through an electoral college instead of a direct popular vote violates the basic democratic principle of majority rule.

At every level, our elections are run in an appallingly amateurish manner by individuals selected for party loyalty, not merit. We refuse to acknowledge that administering a vibrant democracy is a prime responsibility of government. Our laws governing ballot access are openly designed to favor the candidates of the two major parties at the expense of third-party challengers or independents.

Our elections are unduly influenced by wealthy donors in a process that all too often looks more like an auction than an exercise in self-government. Our campaign financing system invites cynicism and corruption while delegating the power to select candidates and set the national agenda to a minuscule, unrepresentative segment of the population. Our patterns of representation unfairly favor incumbents and turn legislatures into self-perpetuating oligarchies. Our campaigns are dominated by saturation TV advertising that inevitably spirals down into sloganeering and name-calling, thus providing immense advantages to well-financed candidates--without producing an informed electorate. Finally, the very idea of an independent judiciary functioning above politics as the ultimate guardian of democracy, individual rights, and the rule of law stands imperiled.

Failure to maintain physical infrastructure invites accidents. If, in the face of the 2000 presidential fiasco, we do not take immediate steps to update and repair our frayed and outdated democratic infrastructure, we will suffer more democratic accidents in the future. Voting participation will continue to decline. Respect for the democratic process will continue to erode, ultimately putting at risk the nation's greatest asset--respect for the law. Our nation's agenda, shaped by the rich, will continue to speak to the needs of only a slice of the population. Our elections will continue to be administered as amateurish exercises in partisan self-interest and our legislatures will become even more oligarchic. Politics will increasingly be viewed by Americans of all ages with rueful distaste instead of heartfelt pride.

It need not be this way. Americans should begin building a democracy for the twenty-first century. Although some necessary reforms are not likely to win enactment anytime soon, it is important to stimulate public debate about what it will take to reclaim and redeem our democracy. Here is the core list of urgent reforms.

Every citizen should be encouraged to vote--and every vote should count. Registration and voting need not be burdensome chores. The mechanics of voting and registration must be brought up to date, with particular attention paid to narrowing the electoral gap between rich and poor.

Democracy is too important to leave to amateur patronage appointees. Election administration should be upgraded by developing a nonpartisan core of election officials who are devoted to democracy and capable of applying uniform rules that ensure equal treatment of all voters.

Voters should be given greater opportunities to register preferences. Reflexive reliance on gerrymandered single-member districting should give way to experiments with more representative ways to organize elections. Examples include repealing the ban on multimember congressional districting and using nonpartisan districting commissions.

Big money should not trump electoral equality. The soft-money and issue-advertising loopholes in the current campaign finance laws must be closed and subsidized access to the media provided until we decide whether to adopt full public funding of the campaign process.

Beyond these measures, spelled out in greater detail below, are more-far-reaching measures that will require the assembly of a powerful constituency for democratic reform--abolition of the current electoral college, for example, and a constitutional amendment explicitly protecting the right to vote. But in the short run, there are many ways to start overhauling our outdated election system and revitalizing our democracy.

Increasing Voter Turnout

During the nineteenth century, about 75 percent of the eligible electorate actually voted. Today, after a century of steady decline, about 50 percent of the eligible electorate vote for president. Nonpresidential turnout hovers around 40 percent. When voting participation drops below 50 percent, elected officials lack a true mandate to govern. Worse, since the actual voting electorate is richer, whiter, and better educated, the nation's politics tilts dramatically toward the agenda of the haves who vote rather than the needs of the poorer, less-educated citizens who stay home. Given the enormous effort expended over the last 50 years in removing formal barriers to voting, why is voter participation declining?

At the end of the eighteenth century, elections in the United States were casual, laissez-faire events. Interested citizens gathered voluntarily on election day and expressed their preferences orally or through ballots printed and provided by a preferred candidate or political party. During the nineteenth century, the state's role in the electoral process expanded in at least three dramatic ways. First, it fell to the state to ensure a secret ballot; this necessitated substantial governmental control over the mechanics of voting. Second, in order to prevent ballot confusion and to stop fraud, the state was given power to promulgate an official ballot listing government-sanctioned candidates exclusively. Finally, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the state assumed responsibility for maintaining lists of qualified voters, who were obliged to register in advance of the election.

The result of greater state involvement in the electoral process was a decrease in fraud, and fairer, more orderly elections. But the new state-imposed restrictions contributed to a dramatic decrease in electoral participation. Within years of their adoption, voter turnout in American presidential elections dropped from around 75 percent to below 50 percent in 1924, and it has almost never exceeded 60 percent during the twentieth century. Political historians such as Walter Dean Burnham have demonstrated that the "reforms" that led to voter registration schemes were not just neutral good-government measures to reduce fraud but deliberate efforts by elites to reduce mass turnout.

Despite the significant growth of state power over the electoral process during the nineteenth century and the corresponding increase in obstacles to voting and running for office, there has not been a parallel twentieth-century evolution in the state's affirmative obligation to make democracy work by encouraging participation. Low turnout and feeble politics are a chicken-and-egg problem. Low turnout is both the symptom of democratic decay and a cause of worsening disease. A more substantively engaging politics, of course, would invite higher turnout. But in the meantime, investment in techniques designed to increase voter turnout would, by itself, help to revive politics. Here are some options.

A democracy day. By statute and custom, federal and most state elections take place on a Tuesday in November, forcing most working people to take time off to vote, or to shoehorn their vote into the short period when the polls are open before or after work. Virtually every other developed democracy either schedules its elections on weekends or declares election day a holiday. Why force citizens to choose between work and voting? If Congress changed the dates for federal elections to a weekend, the states would almost certainly follow. Alternatively, Congress could move election day to Veterans Day, a patriotic holiday that falls very close to existing election day. A democracy day on Veterans Day would help change voting from a chore to a celebration.

Extended voting. By tradition, American elections are held over a span of hours on a single day, although Oregon has adopted an extended process that allows voters to cast ballots by mail over a period of several weeks. Many democracies allow voting to take place over both days of a weekend. At a minimum, presidential voting should be carried out over a 24-hour period from coast to coast, thereby minimizing the impact that publicized election returns in the East have on voting patterns in the rest of the country.

Better voting technology. The mechanics of voting are appallingly outdated and unequal. Some voters have access to relatively sophisticated optical-scanning voting devices, while others vote by paper ballot or with notoriously inaccurate punch-card machines. Voters in many cities use outdated machines that are no longer being manufactured and cannot be properly maintained. Inadequate voting technology leads to mechanical breakdowns, long lines at the polls, and the inability to count thousands of ballots, including those of would-be voters who give up in frustration and leave without casting their ballot. At a minimum, access to acceptable voting technology must be made generally available to all voters on an equal basis.

We should develop technology that allows voting with at least the convenience we now associate with banking and buying gasoline. Internet voting has been initiated in Arizona and proposed as a general reform. So has the development of touch-screen voting machines similar to ATMs. Discussion of advanced technology for voting must, however, consider the impact of such new methods on the electoral divide that separates rich and poor. Internet voting, unless carefully supplemented, will tend to increase the already unacceptable imbalance between rich and poor voters. There is also the danger of new forms of electronic voting fraud.

A uniform absentee policy. Absentee ballots are important to permit the elderly and infirm to vote, in addition to ensuring that persons out of the district on election day, such as military personnel, can vote. But our current absentee ballot procedures are hopelessly complex, with each local election board applying its own arcane system. The resulting complexity and nonuniformity causes confusion, reduces turnout, and provides ample opportunities for unfair behavior, even fraud.

Congress could provide a uniform rule for absentee ballots in all federal elections. The states would almost certainly adopt the federal standards. Thanks to advances in telecommunications, all ballots might someday be absentee, in the sense that they may be cast from a remote location, using advanced voting technology. Whether such decentralized voting would mean the loss of the civic solidarity associated with interacting at a polling place is an important topic for discussion.

Honest and modern ballot design. Currently, the form of the ballot is designed at the local level by patronage appointees with little or no technical expertise. Partisan interests often shape the content, typography, and layout as local officials jockey for favored spots on the ballot. At a minimum, we should develop a procedure for designing a fair and usable ballot for all elections. Technology will play a role, but there is no need to wait for a technological fix before taking steps to prevent massive voter confusion of the sort that disenfranchised so many voters in Florida last November.

Voting as a civic duty. Unlike many important functions of citizenship--such as jury service, military conscription, payment of taxes, cooperation with the census, school attendance, and compulsory vaccinations--we continue to view voting as wholly optional. But isn't our common stake in a vibrant and functioning democracy sufficient to justify not merely an opportunity but an obligation to vote? Voting is considered a civic duty in Australia, and turnout is 90 percent.

Some argue that it is Orwellian to coerce political participation and that democracy may not benefit from the votes of unwilling participants. But devising a convenient "opt out" mechanism for dissenters could address such objections while emphasizing the civic duty of all to participate in democratic governance. In effect, we could shift the inertial burden to persons who do not wish to vote by requiring them to "opt out," rather than requiring voters to "opt in."

A legally established "duty" to vote could be encouraged by mild incentives--such as recognition stickers for license plates or preferential access to certain minor public services--instead of imposing even mild sanctions. The mere discussion of the issue highlights the [affirmative] obstacles to voting that should be removed.

Reforming Voter Registration

The obstacles to voter registration are wholly state-created, yet the state takes almost no responsibility for minimizing them. The net result is that wealthier, better-educated segments of the electorate surmount the transaction costs in far greater numbers than their poorer, less-well-educated countrymen do. What can be done?

Government's duty to register voters. We could begin by shifting the burden of voter registration to the state. The United States is the only developed democracy that places the onus of registration solely on the prospective voter. Every other democracy acknowledges an obligation on the part of the state to assemble the list of registered voters, either by imposing a duty to register to vote or by taking responsibility for assembling the lists. If Great Britain, Canada, France, and Germany assume the task of assembling lists of eligible voters, why shouldn't the United States adopt similar policies?

Same-day voter registration. Six states currently allow same-day voter registration. Not surprisingly, five of the six boast the highest levels of voter turnout in the nation. The principal argument against same-day voter registration is the increased risk of fraud. But there are easy antifraud remedies--such as requiring proof of identity, evidence of residence, sworn affidavits, and the use of segregated paper ballots for same-day registrants.

Automatic voter registration. Another option is to register voters automatically whenever they pay taxes, get a driver's license, graduate from high school, file a change-of-address form with the post office, sign up for the draft, register a car, buy stamps, submit a claim for unemployment insurance, enroll in welfare programs, or otherwise interact with the state. This is merely a question of developing the technology and putting it into use.

Modernization of voting records. Many states continue to maintain voter registration records by hand. Even those states that have computerized the data often maintain separate local systems that cannot communicate with one another. Imagine the impact if automobile registration and licensing records were nonuniform and were processed manually. Uniform computerization would permit rapid checks for fraud and would make it much easier to register voters and to change registration when a voter moves. It would make same-day registration even easier, and might even allow for tapping into parallel databases like utility, telephone, and school registration records.

Expand the Electorate

Most formal obstacles to voting left over from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been abolished. Restrictions based on race, gender, wealth, and residency have been overturned by constitutional amendment or invalidated by the Supreme Court. Two significant formal obstacles remain.

Enfranchisement of criminal offenders. A number of states--Florida is a prime example--continue to bar persons convicted of felonies from voting, even after they serve a full sentence. Florida thus disenfranchises more than half a million voters, including 15 percent of the male Afro-American vote, often as the result of youthful brushes with the law that would not have been deemed felonies if committed by children of privilege. It would be interesting to determine how many African Americans in Florida are barred from voting because of a drunk-driving conviction.

Empowerment of resident aliens. Almost no voting privileges are afforded to resident aliens, who pay taxes and serve in the military. (A few cities allow resident aliens who are parents to vote in school board elections.) With few exceptions, the degree of political participation for resident aliens has not been an issue in the United States, although it has been the subject of careful consideration in the European community, where many localities, including Paris, grant voting rights to resident aliens.

Public Management of Democracy

Through agencies ranging from the Federal Election Commission to local boards of election, patronage appointees of the two major parties run the electoral process in the United States. At best, the administration of our elections is unprofessional; at worst, it is blatantly if not corruptly partisan. In recent years, we have evolved an excellent nonpartisan system of judicial administration. There is no reason why a nonpartisan electoral civil service, trained to operate an efficient and fair democracy, cannot be substituted for the existing patronage system. Indeed, reforming the administration of our electoral process may be the single most important thing we can do to shore up American democracy. Reforms in technology, improved voter registration, and enhanced turnout will be extremely difficult to achieve without capable election officials.

A democracy budget. Our decaying democratic infrastructure in part reflects a failure to acknowledge that democracy is an expensive form of government. But we tend to adopt cut-rate solutions to running a democracy, leaving the financing of the democratic process to the political parties or to the wealthy. Every level of government should add a line item to cover the costs of administering democracy. Teasing out the real cost of democracy would focus attention on repairing the infrastructure and would create a process for debating needed improvements.

Shoring Up the Right to Run for Office

The Constitution says nothing about the right to run for office. In fact, it was not until 1968 that the Supreme Court recognized a weak constitutional right to appear on the ballot. Widespread confusion over rules governing ballot access affects competition for major-party nominations as well as the role of third parties and independents. National and state laws need to be reformed.

Rules for presidential primaries. When should the presidential primary elections take place, and who should be able to participate in them? Currently, each state legislature determines the date of the primary, often in consultation with national party leadership. The almost random order of the primaries may give undue influence to the voters of some states while shutting out others from the nomination process. Some have argued that uniform presidential primary dates be set, perhaps by region, on a rotating basis. Others have urged that a national presidential primary be held on a single day.

Rules governing access to the presidential primary ballot are also set at the state legislative level, usually after consultation with the state leadership of each major party. Virtually all states require the presidential candidates to be party members. But rules vary dramatically. Some states allow all viable candidates easy primary-ballot access. Others, like New York, make ballot access so difficult that it has taken bitter and expensive litigation in order to place major candidates on the New York Republican presidential primary ballot in the last two elections. Given the national stake in electing a president, shouldn't there be a uniform set of rules governing access to the presidential primary ballot?

The role of subordinate parties. Under existing rules, a third-party or independent candidate for president must expend very significant resources to obtain ballot status in all 50 states. This depletes funds the candidate needs for the general election. Given the national nature of the presidential election, should we seek a uniform standard? The goal would be to discourage totally frivolous candidacies but eliminate the needless draining of third-party resources. If third parties are viewed as fringe players who provide little more than an opportunity to cast a protest vote, ballot access rules should remain stringent. If, however, third parties are viewed as important sources of new ideas and as crucial competition for the two major parties, ballot access should be provided on liberal terms. Until we have a serious discussion about the role of third parties, ballot access rules will be driven mainly by the desire of the major parties to protect themselves from competition.

Primaries and challenges to incumbents. Last year, Democrat Hilda Solis of Los Angeles successfully challenged incumbent Congressman Matthew Martinez in the party's primary election. It was front-page news in California, and it put other incumbents on notice. How easy should it be to launch a primary challenge in one of the major parties? Must the insurgent candidate be a party member? For how long? How many signatures should be required on the nominating petition? Should decisions about primary rules be made by the political party or be imposed by the state? Should the state be entitled to mandate a primary when the party wants to use other forms of nomination?

And who should be entitled to vote in a party primary? Even more fundamental, who should make the decisions about whether to have a party primary and who should be allowed to vote in it? The party leadership? The state legislature? The electoral majority through a referendum? Courts through constitutional adjudication? Congress through uniform rules for federal elections? Whatever the remedy, current procedures work to give incumbents something close to lifetime tenure. Term limits are a poor substitute for contested primaries. We need a broad national debate and consistent rules.

Repairing Representative Government

The inevitable growth of large, complex political units doomed the experiment with pure, direct democracy that flourished in the New England town meeting. In our representative democracy, the electorate chooses legislators to act as proxies reflecting the will of the people. But our current structure of representation is inadequate to the task.

For one thing, incumbents rarely lose. The re-election rate for the House of Representatives is usually well above 90 percent and often approaches 100 percent. In the 2000 election, every legislative incumbent running for re-election in New York State was successful. Why is it so hard to unseat an incumbent? One potent tool protecting officeholders is their ability to gerrymander electoral-district boundary lines (and such incumbent-protection deals are often bipartisan). New computer technology allows extremely fine judgments about where to draw precinct borders which sometimes even slice through multifamily buildings. Ironically, because it is impossible to gerrymander Senate lines, it is now easier to unseat a Senate incumbent than a member of the House.

The 1962 Supreme Court decision mandating a "one person, one vote" standard for the apportionment process cured one significant evil but left open ample opportunities for electoral manipulation. The Court recognizes a cause of action protecting the political minority from the grossest forms of electoral gerrymandering, yet it has proved impossible to enforce the right. In fact, the high court has actually made things worse by explicitly allowing incumbency protection as a valid justification for districting. Traditional requirements of contiguity and compactness provide some check on political gerrymandering, but they may hinder efforts to establish interest districts that do not coincide with a geographical unit. Unless we can devise methods for returning a degree of competition to the electoral process, voters will rationally stay home.

How can we ensure that the political proxies chosen through the electoral process actually reflect the society at large? No consensus exists about how to decide what groups or interests deserve legislative representation. While the Supreme Court has insisted that the principle of "one person, one vote" be respected and that race not play a disproportionate role, we have no guidelines about who or what should be represented. American democracy has tended to ignore the problem by concentrating on geographical representation. But geographical districts reflect only one form of political representation. What about economic interest, such as agriculture or manufacturing; economic status, such as rich or poor; age; political affiliation; gender; race; religion; sexual preference; marital status; parenthood (or nonparenthood); educational status; and a host of other possible interest groupings?

Certain groups have historically been excluded from full participation in the electoral process--first through formal exclusion, and then by informal techniques. Race, gender, and poverty have been the three most obvious bases for exclusion. Even after the removal of formal restrictions, the actual "representation" of racial minorities, women, and the poor in the nation's legislatures remains woefully inadequate.

The Supreme Court has imposed an almost impossible burden on efforts to draw lines to enhance the political power of racial groups that have historically been excluded from participation in American democracy. The Court has forbidden the drawing of lines when race is the dominant motivation, but has permitted race to be a factor in the process. And the Court's current margin of support even for this ambiguous doctrine is a precarious five to four. It is important to put forth more vigorous forms of minority representation, racial and otherwise.

Then again, it has been argued that "packing" large numbers of minority voters into a given district to enhance minority representation actually dilutes the political power of minorities by wasting minority votes in "safe" minority districts while draining the votes from surrounding districts that might elect nonminorities sympathetic to minorities. One option is to rely on "influence" districts, where minority voters can affect the outcome and thus compel the candidates to pay serious attention to minority voters' concerns. But influence districting is not likely to produce more minority representatives. And it is possible to draw geographical lines with predictable racial content yet not give influence to other political minorities, including women.

Enriching Democratic Choice

American elections are almost exclusively winner-take-all contests: single-member-district, first-past-the-post exercises in which the winner of an electoral plurality is awarded the seat and is vested with responsibility for representing both the winners and losers. When fused with a regime of political gerrymandering, the American system may act to disenfranchise both winners and losers. In a legislative district with a 65-35 political gerrymander, the political minority consisting of 35 percent of the electorate are, literally, incapable of electing officials who share their views. Unless their disenfranchisement is balanced by a reciprocal disenfranchisement of their opponents in some other district, the minority are out of political luck. Similarly, even members of the political majority are marginalized, since the election is a foregone conclusion. Such a process is made to order for reciprocal gerrymandering, which leaves real electoral power in the hands of political elites who choose the candidates.

Efforts to enrich voter choice by experimenting with proportional voting systems have generally been rejected in the United States because they are thought to threaten electoral stability. But there are several ways to enrich voter choice without sacrificing stability. For example, modern technology makes possible an instant-runoff system that allows a voter to cast both a first- and a second-choice ballot. If a voter's first choice is not among the top two vote getters, the ballot automatically reverts to the second choice. Such a system is currently widely used in Ireland, and to elect the mayor of London. Experimentation at the local level with such an instant-runoff technique can tell us whether it is a device to enrich voter choice with no loss in stability.

Cross-endorsements and fusion tickets. Laws in most states forbid cross-endorsement of candidates by more than one political party. These archaic regulations could be repealed, thus allowing a voter to cast a ballot for a candidate with a chance to win and also express a preference for the platform of a third party. While the Supreme Court has upheld the ban on cross-endorsement as a matter of federal constitutional law, the practice may well violate many state constitutions. In any event, its role as a device to protect the two major parties against competition could be stressed as part of a grass-roots campaign to repeal the existing cross-endorsement bans, all of which date from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Multimember districting and cumulative voting. Moving away from universal adherence to single-member-district, first-past-the-post constituencies toward multimember constituencies should be considered, both to provide more accurate representation and to enrich voter choice. When multimember constituencies are linked to voting procedures such as cumulative or "bullet" voting that permit voters to target their votes to particular candidates, minority voters gain a richer method of expressing political choice. The Congressional Black Caucus advocates repeal of the federal statute banning use of multimember constituencies in congressional elections precisely because, if properly used, multimember constituencies linked to cumulative or bullet voting provide richer choices for many minority voters.

Proportional representation. Many democracies allocate legislative seats in proportion to the share of the popular vote obtained by each political party. Although this approach has been associated with coalition governments and political instability, it is possible to link proportional representation with traditional first-past-the-post systems to create hybrids that provide voters with greater choice while preserving stable democratic majorities.

A Constitutional Right to Vote

The essence of democracy is the right to vote. But the United States Constitution--the most successful democratic charter in human history--does not guarantee the right to vote, even for presidential electors. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. Supreme Court, confronted with the lack of a broad protection of the franchise in the Constitution, has usually resorted to the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause when struggling to find constitutional grounds for upholding the right to vote. Congress has also provided important protection to voters who were once excluded from the franchise because of race. But as the Supreme Court's decision in the Florida presidential election case made clear, the equal protection clause is not an adequate substitute for an express constitutional guarantee of the right to vote. Indeed, as the Court's unfortunate ruling demonstrates, in the hands of hostile or insensitive justices, a federal constitutional right to vote rooted solely in the equal protection clause can be deployed as an obstacle to the effective protection of the right to vote by the general population. Thus, although it is clearly a long-range project, we should consider pursuing a federal constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote.

The amendment process at the state constitutional level tends to be less demanding than at the federal level. A parallel strategy at the state level, pursuing a state constitutional protection of the right to vote, would be an important reinforcement of democracy and would provide a grass-roots organizing strategy.

Money and politics. If Florida had never happened, the 2000 presidential election would have been a failure because it was financed by enormous contributions from wealthy interests, often with no limitation or disclosure of the source or amount of the funds. The loopholes and omissions in our existing campaign finance laws have rendered the existing regulatory regime wholly inadequate.

Improved disclosure. The least controversial aspect of campaign finance regulation is disclosure. But two principal flaws undermine current disclosure rules: the failure to collect and publish the information in a format likely to inform the electorate, and the huge loophole that permits massive campaign spending to occur with no disclosure at all.

Most data for federal elections is processed effectively and quickly by the Federal Election Commission and made available on the Internet. But most states have not attempted to computerize the contribution data, much less make it readily available to the electorate. For disclosure to be useful, it must occur quickly, and in a format likely to come to public attention.

Enormous sums are expended to influence elections via so-called issue ads that skirt contribution limits and disclosure laws by avoiding certain magic words (such as "vote for") while delivering an unmistakable campaign message favoring or attacking a particular candidate. Such black-market spending may well exceed the amount spent openly by candidates and supporters. While serious First Amendment issues would be raised by an across-the-board challenge to the right of political anonymity, compelled disclosure of the source of funds that pay for ads clearly aimed at affecting the outcome of a particular election would probably pass First Amendment muster.

Limiting campaign contributions. A rough consensus holds that limits may be placed on the sources of campaign donation. Under existing rules, corporations and labor unions are not permitted to contribute directly to candidates. The Supreme Court has even held that corporations may be barred from expending corporate money to influence elections. Similarly, the Supreme Court has upheld limits on how much individuals can contribute to a candidate. But the regulatory system has collapsed because of enormous loopholes that permit corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individual donors to pour virtually unlimited amounts of money into the campaign through phony issue ads and soft-money contributions to political parties--and to do so under the fiction that the parties will not divert the money to political campaigns. Unless these loopholes are closed, wealth will continue to drive out participation by ordinary people. But as I have indicated, the decay of our democracy goes far beyond the malign influence of money.

No one can predict the long-term implications of the 2000 presidential election for American democracy. While public reaction to the election may lead to greater voter participation based on a renewed belief that every vote matters, it could also lead to greater voter apathy based on the belief that voting can't make a difference. Which course is ultimately chosen depends in substantial part on whether effective action is taken to address the many problems that infect our democratic infrastructure. In order to seize this moment, three steps are necessary: First, we must catalog the wide range of interconnected problems hobbling American democracy. Second, we must identify pragmatic solutions that can be implemented with reasonable dispatch. Third, once we have agreed on an agenda for structural reform, we must develop strategies to turn ideas into action--through nothing less than a nationwide pro-democracy movement.