29 January 2009

Roy Brown.

Roy Brown has a good idea, but SB-227 needs improvements

Roy Brown has a good idea on campaign finance reform — mandatory electronic filing — but he needs to take it a few steps further than he has. Brown, the Republican state senator from Billings who lost to Brian Schweitzer in the gubernatorial election last fall, has introduced SB-227, which goes by the short title of “Electronic filing and additional campaign reports.” SB-227 does not define electronic filing, so it’s possible that filing by fax could be so defined, but I think Brown wants the data filed by computer.

SB-227 applies to candidates for state office, such as governor or secretary of state, and political committees involved in those elections. It requires more frequent reporting, at least once a month from March through October during the year of the campaign, and filing the reports electronically. It does not, however, apply to legislative races or ballot issues — but it should.

Frequent reporting of contributions and expenditures, and electronic filing of those data, are critical elements of transparency for elections. Who gives to whom, and on what the money is spent, for obvious reasons help voters assess the merits of candidates. But that information is not easy to come by in Montana’s woefully inadequate, paper based campaign finance reporting system.

Campaign finance reports — C5s for candidates — are submitted to the state’s Commissioner of Political Practices and required local officials (the county clerk and recorder) either as paper documents or electronic images of the form. Often they are submitted by fax, a low resolution medium. Once at CPP, they are scanned and the images converted to PDFs, which are then posted on the agency’s website. That process has three significant defects:

• It’s slow. Up to two weeks can pass before the report is available on the website. The election can be over before those who cannot inspect the C5s in Helena can obtain the information.
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• The PDFs often are next to illegible. This is especially true for reports from legislative candidates, many of whom fill out their C5s by hand, sometimes with a scrawl, sometimes using an ink that doesn’t scan clearly.
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• The data are not readily available to readers who want to import the data into a database for analysis. Major campaigns have thousands of donations, hundreds of expenditures; each must be entered into a database via a keyboard, a slow, expensive process that is fraught with error.

Electronic filing can eliminate these problems, but only if the data are in a standard format and quickly made available to the public in an online database — and the online database must permit downloading all of the campaign finance data in a format that citizens can import into their own databases.

The key to making this work is mandating that candidates and political committees submit the required data in a standard format. This is not a new idea, but it needs to be implemented with care; poorly designed databases are the bane of business and government alike.

There will be complaints, especially from neo-Luddites, technophobes, and candidates who prefer not filing campaign finance reports while they are still alive. Legislative candidates who serve as their own campaign treasurers will resist more frequent filing because it takes time away from campaigning. All these objections are understandable, but none is persuasive. More transparency is needed, and this is the best way to provide it.

My thanks to Roy Brown for providing Flathead Memo with a high quality photograph of himself.