Inching the government of the most wired state in the Union into the digital age is no easy task, but the California Senate has taken one baby-step forward with passage of a bill that would require electronic filing of campaign-finance documents for all statewide candidates and ballot measures.
"I think people are beginning to realize that digital filing will ultimately be inevitable," Senator Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach), author of the Online Disclosure Act of 1997, said Thursday. "But we'll still have to work very hard to get 15 to 20 Republicans to support the measure as it passes through the Assembly."
Although Karnette's initiative requires candidates to begin electronically filing campaign-finance documents as early as 1998, it initially allows them to file on diskette rather than online.
The digital sunlight bill also requires California's Secretary of State office, which collects most of the hundreds of thousands of pages of campaign-finance reports filed each election cycle, to develop an online filing format by 1 September 1999.
Because Karnette's proposal updates an existing law, the Political Reform Act of 1974 (otherwise known as the Sunshine Act), she must rally a two-thirds majority in both houses before the bill can go to Governor Pete Wilson's desk.
On Wednesday, the job seemed easy, and the bill passed the 40-member Senate by a vote of 31 to 7.
But in spite of the resounding support, Karnette said she believes that online privacy issues could prove a significant hurdle to final passage of the bill. Other observers say partisan snares may still trip up the legislation.
Last year alone, five different bills containing electronic-filing provisions succumbed to cross-party bickering. This year, two other bills, by Senator Quentin Kopp, a San Francisco independent, and Assemblyman Jim Cunneen (R-San Jose), have already died on the vine.
"My biggest fear is that partisan politics will bog this issue down in the same way it has in the past," said Kim Alexander, executive director of the California Voter Foundation. "The Assembly tends to be much more partisan than the Senate, and they already killed one online disclosure bill this year."
