OFFICIALS MUST PROBE VOTING IRREGULARITIES

Although the Missouri secretary of state's office concluded that no election results in St. Louis were affected by voting irregularities during the General Election on Nov. 7, there are still important questions to be answered.

In the end, perhaps criminal charges would even be in order.

But the report, delivered at the very end of Secretary of State Bekki Cook's administration, is being viewed by many state officials as putting an end to the matter of voting wrong-doing. Instead, the report should be seen as a call for action.

It is the obligation of the secretary of state to certify results of elections around the state. There was little doubt that some of the things that went on in St. Louis on Election Day were plain wrong. In its report, the secretary of state's job wasn't to determine who or what went wrong. The task was to decide if the outcome of elections in St. Louis were affected.

Had the secretary of state believed any election might possibly have ended in a different winner because of the problems, she would have had an obligation to hold up certification. No one is questioning that Cook reached the right conclusion in that regard.

But it is too easy to take that report and say, "See, those irregularities didn't change anything. So that's the end of it."

Cook's successor, Matt Blunt, has already taken steps to initiate an organized review of what happened in St. Louis.

What happened? Unregistered voters were allowed to vote. Properly registered voters were turned away because of inept record-keeping. And some polls were kept open past the 7 p.m. closing time until an appeals court closed them down.

Meanwhile, the St. Louis Election Board is taking a lot of heat for at least attempting to clean up its voter-registration records. The board sent postcards to registered voters who hadn't voted since the 1994 election. More than 30,000 of those cards were returned by the Postal Service as being undeliverable. The election board put those voters on an inactive list. Critics say that kept some voters from voting.

It is the responsibility of voters to maintain their voter registration if they move. Voting officials were right to bar them from voting, except in the case of voting for president and vice president. In those cases, improperly registered voters can sign a waiver and vote only for those two offices.

There are plenty of issues like that to sort out. Let's hope Blunt's efforts remain focused and energized.