When the new Congress convenes next January, ethics reform should be its first order of business. The glaring need for reform is underscored day after day, as more and more lawmakers end up wilting under the scrutiny of the Justice Department or investigative reporters. If the Democrats do take the House, here is a new and bold way to demonstrate that they’re beginning a new era of confidence in Congress: The day after the outcome is clear, Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) should announce her intention to appoint outgoing Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.) as the new chief of ethics investigations and oversight in the House of Representatives.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

That’s right--Joel Hefley, a Republican. Hefley, of course, served as chairman of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, until he was fired from the post by Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) for the sin of doing his job conscientiously. Hefley has shown repeatedly that he cares deeply about integrity in Congress. He is retiring this year and has shown his integrity, and independence, by refusing to endorse his party’s candidate to replace him because of his sleazy campaign. I am sure the last thing he wants is to get back into the ethics business, but I also believe he would respond to the urgent need to create real integrity in the system. What better way to show you are serious about real ethics enforcement?

This idea is not a replacement for creation of an Office of Public Integrity. The House should put a prominent independent professional in charge of the office while having Hefley separately lead a bipartisan panel of distinguished former Members to oversee the office and to handle preliminary ethics investigations.

It is time for House leaders to think outside the box when it comes to restoring ethical standards and public confidence in Congress. Joel Hefley is not going to go off half-cocked on a prosecutorial crusade, nor will he conduct partisan vendettas. He will do the job fairly and firmly. Think about what a signal it would send to the country about the willingness of a new team to transcend the bitter bickering we have now to clean up the culture of corruption.

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The latest polls of the key Senate races show several pivotal races within the margin of error--most of them 2 or 3 points either way. If the House no longer looks like a nail-biter when it comes to partisan control, the Senate surely does. And again that raises the specter of a meltdown in the election process, with several seats remaining up in the air after Nov. 7, a Senate majority at stake and huge questions about the legitimacy of the results--and doubt about whether the outcomes can be adjudicated fairly.

The problems start, but do not end, with the voting machines themselves. Yet another troubling story about the voting-machine manufacturer Diebold has come to light, this one about how many of its machines are keyed to original passwords, meaning that large numbers of people may have access to them, making them easier to hack.

We also have to deal with the continuing issues raised by the top-flight Princeton University researchers, led by Professor Edward Felten, who, in less than a minute, inserted a virus in a common Diebold machine that was able to completely skew the results and spread from machine to machine before disappearing without a trace. Felten’s team also contended that what Diebold bills as a security firewall was laughable, given that the machines could be unlocked by the kind of mini-bar key found in thousands of hotels--and available for purchase for a trivial sum on eBay.

These problems, and others, have been met by Diebold with relentless stonewalling, attempts to trash every critic without engaging any of them and a refusal to submit to any tough questioning from journalists or others. Of course, the other election-voting machine companies are no better--all they want to do is sell their machines to election officials, make huge profits and get out, rather than submitting to genuine quality control or demonstrating real concern about the integrity of elections. But even if they’re all bad, is there a worse corporate citizen in America than Diebold?

The problems go beyond the touch-screen machines. The excellent resource Electionline.org has just issued a report singling out Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington as the states where chaos could ensue this November, with problems ranging from the use of new voting equipment and indications of administrative glitches to a lack of voter verification and new identification requirements. In many, if not most, jurisdictions, there are too few poll workers, and among the ones we do have, too few have the appropriate training or expertise to work with the new machines.

Now throw in yet another sign of trouble: Chicago’s voter database easily was hacked into, exposing vital information on tens of thousands of voters and making it clear that their identities, and their voting eligibility, were open and directly at risk. Add in the fact that we have partisan election officials in most of the battleground and suspect states, making election administration suspect because of the appearance (if not the reality) of a lack of neutrality. The result is the proverbial witch’s brew that could turn into electoral disaster.

The last thing we need in a country where partisan margins are close and where people are unhappy with, and suspicious of, their governing institutions is a months-long struggle over who has won the elections, with half the country convinced that the outcome was rigged. If that happens, those Members of Congress who refused to take up election reforms this year, stubbornly clinging to the notion that the (underfunded) Help America Vote Act solved the problems, or at least that we should wait another election cycle or two to grapple with the issue again, will have a lot of explaining to do. So will the institution’s leaders, who have added another sorry chapter to the saga of this do-nothing Congress.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.