Out of the political murk surrounding the issue of campaign-finance reform, a ray of digital sunlight is finally emerging, says a California Voter Foundation report on the state of online campaign-finance filing nationwide.
"Election commissions around the country have been trying to find ways to encourage electronic filing for several years," said foundation director and report author Kim Alexander. "But with all the public frustration about money and politics this year, more and more politicians are coming around to the point of view that online disclosure is a fairly simple way of the avoiding more complicated issues and still showing constituents that there's some concern about the issue."
Tuesday's Digital Sunlight Progress Report details digital-disclosure initiatives in seven states: Maryland, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Virginia, Indiana, and California. Governors in Virginia, Indiana, and Maryland have signed digital-disclosure bills; the legislatures in California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania have all passed bills aimed at moving from a paper-based filing system to an electronic one.
In Wisconsin, several digital-disclosure bills are making their way through the state house, and Governor Tommy Thompson's Blue Ribbon Commission on Campaign Finance Reform last month recommended immediate disclosure of campaign-finance records on the Internet.
"The national climate, the massive distrust of influence-peddling that's trickled down from the Clinton campaign-finance scandal, definitely pushed the Illinois bill onto the governor's desk," said Ron Michaelson, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections. "People have been attempting to change certain provisions of our public-disclosure laws for five to ten years. This is the first time we've gotten so far."
As for exactly how far that is, some observers remain skeptical.
"It's great to have that information more easily available, but it's only a small portion of the influence-peddling picture," says Kerry Lauermann, investigative editor of Mother Jones. "For instance, there's still no good way to get at information about independent expenditures - say, who's buying TV time for Al D'Amato?'
Still, Alexander and Michaelson take heart from an impending conference on digital disclosure. Scheduled to be held next month in Chicago, the meeting will be the first in a series aimed at drafting a national standardized format.
"One thing we really want to avoid is the sort of backlash trend against technological initiatives," said Alexander. "So we're trying to avoid a situation where individual states design filing software in a vacuum."
"No one wants to reinvent the wheel," agreed Michaelson.
Representatives from 12 to 15 states are expected to attend the July meeting, which is being coordinated by Bob Watada, director of Hawaii's Campaign Spending Commission, which boasts the granddaddy of all digital-disclosure systems.
"The first one out of the gate always has the hardest time," said Alexander. "We might as well learn from both their successes and failures."
