All candidates for statewide office in Maine must file their campaign finance reports electronically. So, too, do candidates for president of the United States and the U.S. House. But not the U.S. Senate.
It is time for the Senate to join the digital age. It would do so with passage of the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, a bill that has been introduced every year since 2003 but has never come to the floor for a vote.
The Senate system of campaign finance report filing is the antithesis of efficiency and transparency. Most senators file their campaign finance reports, which detail their donations and expenditures, on paper with the secretary of the Senate. The secretary then sends the paper copies to the Federal Elections Commission, which pays a contractor to input the information into its electronic database — at a cost of about $500,000 per year. This process can take weeks, delaying public access to this information, especially considering campaign finance reports sometimes can be thousands of pages long for candidates in an especially competitive or expensive race.
Sens. Angus King and Susan Collins are co-sponsors of the bill. King always has filed electronically.
“People deserve to know who contributes to candidates and elected officials and they deserve to have immediate and easy access to that information, which is why I file my campaign finance reports electronically even though outdated laws don’t require it,” King told the Bangor Daily News.
Collins files paper reports with the Secretary of the Senate, which is still required, even of those senators and candidates who file electronic reports because of the antiquated Senate system.
Both senators’ most recent reports, which cover the second quarter of 2015, are available for viewing on the FEC website.
Twenty current senators have filed electronic reports for the second quarter of 2015, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Only two — John Cornyn of Texas and Thad Cochran of Mississippi — are Republicans. Two U.S. Senate candidates have filed electronically as well.
Congress amended the Federal Election Campaign Finance Act in 1995 to allow but not require electronic filings with the Federal Elections Commission. A subsequent amendment required electronic filings beginning in 2001. However, a drafting error left the Senate off the list of entities subject to electronic filing requirements. As a result, only House and presidential candidates, along with PACs, are required to file electronically. Attempts to correct the error and add the Senate repeatedly have failed.
There has been no publicly stated opposition to adding the Senate to the electronic filing requirements. Instead, attempts to do so either have languished or died as a result of procedural maneuvers, according to a timeline put together by the Sunlight Foundation.
This leaves the public with the impression that senators and Senate candidates have something to hide. They can end decades of needless stalling by passing this overdue legislation, to which King and Collins have committed their support. It would benefit voters seeking transparency and modernity while saving money and time.
