You can’t make this stuff up: Republican leaders in the House found another way to deep-six any serious ethics and lobbying reform, on the very same day that prosecutors heralded the sorry end to the career of Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) and documented the sordid list of activities that has led him to a prison term.

Resident Scholar Norman J. Ornstein

Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.), Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) and Rules Chairman David Dreier (Calif.) decided to take up and pass a laughable sham of an earmark "reform" and hoped that nobody would notice it is neither serious nor a reform. They concocted a fig-leaf rules change that provides disclosure on earmarks, but one that does not encompass all or most earmarks, that is not at all certain to stay in place and that provides no protection against chicanery in earmarking, including last-minute lawmaking and lawmakers or their family members exploiting the system for personal gain.

The promises made by Hastert after the Jack Abramoff scandal broke--specifically that his party would lead the fight to enact sweeping lobbying reform--were dropped like a hot rock as soon as the public scrutiny eased, which strongly suggests that the intent of the Speaker was to deflect public outrage, not significantly change the status quo.

Boehner, too, kicked off his campaign to become Majority Leader by proclaiming his credentials as an original reformer--a charter member of the "Gang of Seven" that shamed the chamber over its excesses under Democratic rule. But then he turned his reform campaign into an anti-reform campaign once he saw that Members had no interest in making serious changes.

Ever since, the energies of the leadership have gone to minimizing change in the House. The Senate is no better. So far at least, it hasn’t even felt the need to pass a sham reform.

The earmark culture has careened out of control. The wheeling and dealing of staffers enriching themselves and others as they exploit the revolving door is shocking, with Exhibit A being the House Appropriations Committee under Chairman Jerry Lewis (R-Calif.).

As time goes on, more lawmakers will be spotlighted, and probably some will be directly investigated. We have pitifully inadequate lobby disclosure rules and pitifully weak ethics procedures. The leaders may be right; voters will not make this their major issue this fall. But surely there is more at stake than how voters feel. The integrity of Congress, anyone? Doesn’t anybody in power care about that?

With that off my chest--yet again--I want to turn this column’s attention to another outrage, namely the integrity of the voting system as we approach critical elections. One week ago Tuesday, bright and early (way early for me) at 6:45 a.m., I was waiting expectantly at my neighborhood school in Chevy Chase, Md., for the polls to open at 7 so I could do my civic duty before tooling down to Capitol Hill for a 7:30 appointment. But 7 came and went; at 7:15, an embarrassed poll worker came out to the crowd and said they could not find the cards to activate the touch-screen machines. I left, as did many others--a few apparently to catch planes. I was able to get back before the polls closed that evening, but others clearly did not, or could not, return to vote.

Montgomery County has long prided itself as a bastion of civic responsibility--a role model in its voting processes. This was a meltdown, and one that was echoed, to varying degrees, in other parts of the state. Could there be a bigger or clearer wake-up call to the potential disaster that awaits us in the general elections?

The House majority is up for grabs; the most likely outcome is a House that will be within a handful of seats either way. And there very likely will be a half-dozen or more seats that are within a couple hundred votes or less. So here is a nightmare of nightmares: The House hangs in the balance, and the districts that make the difference cannot do recounts because there is no paper trail; the paper trail in jurisdictions that have it find huge discrepancies between it and the numbers recorded on the machines; screw-ups like Montgomery County’s, or worse, disenfranchise large numbers of voters and make any outcome seem less legitimate; jurisdictions across the country lack established procedures for handling disputed elections and get mired in litigation or gridlock; and partisan election officials (à la Florida Republican Rep. Katherine Harris) make decisions that produce outcomes that are questionable at best.

This is not fanciful; it is all too real. And the reality would be even worse than the litany above suggests. All of the horrors above actually could occur with machines that are widely considered to be benign and safe from any corrupting influences. But we do not have such machines.

To all who have not yet done so, I urge you to look at the video of Princeton University researchers corrupting a widely used Diebold voting machine in less than one minute and creating a virus that alters results, spreads from one machine to another and corrupts the whole network, and disappears without a trace after the elections are over. The same computer scientists, led by Edward Felten at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, discovered by chance that the "lock" protecting these machines can be opened by the key used by hotels to open mini-bars, keys that also can be purchased widely on eBay.

Diebold reacted to this news in the way that it and the other manufacturers of voting machines always react--they attacked the scientists. These companies have no interest in the integrity of elections, only in selling as many machines as they can and squelching any doubt about their efficacy.

The problem, of course, goes beyond the machines. There’s also the lack of resources and professionalism in election administration around the country, which makes it easy to produce the kinds of screw-ups like we had in Montgomery County. Apparently, the checklist of equipment to be sent to each polling place failed to list the cards--a low-tech snafu if there ever was one.

The new machines are operated in most places by veteran volunteer poll workers who all too often are technologically challenged. (One test that ought to be applied before a poll worker is brought aboard is to see if he or she can turn the flashing 12:00 on a VCR to the actual time of day.)

A study by experts of voting in the 2006 primary in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where touch-screen machines with paper trails are used, found huge differences in results between the machines’ internals and the paper trails--and they found that many of the Smart Cards that record precinct results got lost on the way to the central office, resulting in incomplete results.

At the same time, the level of confidence in the election system is low, partisan tension is high, and Congress has been absent without leave as this problem looms. Brace yourselves: Troubled as its election was, we could end up looking with envy at Mexico.

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at AEI.