Former U.S. Sens. John Danforth of Missouri and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, two old lions of the Republican Party, recently have re-emerged on the national scene saying they want to promote "public confidence in the outcome" of the Nov. 4 election.

The two have held two national telephone conferences with reporters. They've appeared at the National Press Club and jointly authored commentaries for newspaper opinion pages. Their message: "Every qualified citizen has an honest and transparent opportunity to vote that is free of intimidation," and there should be no "'stuffing the ballot box' with votes obtained by fraud."

Ordinarily, involvement by these two party statesmen, beacons of integrity in their long Senate careers, would be a welcome development.

But independent voters can be forgiven for wondering whether their good reputations are being misused for base partisan purposes. Danforth and Rudman arrived on the scene just as the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain began a curious and deeply cynical attack on the voter registration efforts conducted by the liberal community activist organization ACORN.

With precious little evidence, Danforth and Rudman have reinforced the partisan chorus. They gravely invoke a "nightmare scenario" in which "Election Day won't be the end of it, that 2008 will be a rerun of 2000."

The 2004 election seems to be the closer parallel.

That's when Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's campaign guru, and his associates cranked up "voter fraud" as a principal Republican spin point during the closing days of the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. Demonizing ACORN was the central theme, just as it is now.

But voter fraud was not the scandal of the 2004 elections. It was the effort, run out of the White House and the Justice Department, to push federal prosecutors to pursue voter fraud cases, even in the absence of evidence to support them. Some prosecutors who refused to comply were fired.

To be sure, some ACORN voter registration drives have had problems, mostly centering on registration forms filled out with phony names. In almost all instances, including a case in St. Louis, election authorities — alerted by ACORN managers — have caught the problem.

ACORN's efforts have been the subject of intense, continuous scrutiny for years. Despite such scrutiny, and even with ACORN flagging suspicious applications as required by state election rules, a few reports of bogus registrations still pop up.

That's unfortunate, but it hardly is the "nightmare scenario" the GOP message machine has been chanting to its base. And any evidence of actual voter fraud — phony voters casting votes — has been tellingly absent.

The real question for voters and our democracy on Election Day is one of basic administrative competence, not corruption: Can the system ensure that there will be adequate numbers of ballots, booths and well-trained poll workers to deal with the large numbers of voters anticipated to turn out on Nov. 4?

Meeting that challenge requires calm, deliberative efforts by people of good will, efforts that must begin long before of the climax of an election season. That effort - one with substance and meaning - is one Danforth and Rudman should get behind.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH.

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