Is the Senate finally ready to start filing campaign finance reports electronically?

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., hopes so. Often a pioneer of government accountability initiatives, Feingold has re-introduced the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act to require senatorial candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Secretary of the Senate. After unsuccessful attempts to pass this legislation in the past three sessions of Congress, Feingold and primary co-sponsors Sens. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., hope to push the Senate into modern technological practices. 

"This commonsense bill to make our electoral system more transparent is long overdue," Feingold said in a statement after re-introducing the bill. "The Senate should catch up with the House, the President, and the many Senators who already voluntarily file electronically by passing this reform which has broad bipartisan support." Introduced on Feb. 26, the bill already has 31 co-sponsors.

Under the current system of paper filing, the final disclosure reports of senatorial candidates are not available to the public until after the election due to the time it takes the Federal Election Commission to process the paperwork. Filing on paper not only delays making the information available to the public, but it's also costly. The FEC told Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, that $250,000 goes out to vendors to keystroke the information into a computer. That figure doesn't include the paper cost of printing out hundreds of reports to be transported to the FEC.

During the last session of Congress, Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., killed the e-filing legislation by insisting on an unrelated and controversial amendment to require groups that file ethics complaints to disclose their donors. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., might float the same amendment to stymie the bill once again. 

"I think the amendment [if introduced by Roberts] is a non sequitur," said Malbin. "If it is adopted, the purpose would be to bring down the Senate electronic filing requirement."

(Photo by Liz Lynch)

                                                                                                      --Eliza Krigman