Political Practices keeps track of campaign finance reports, and investigates complaints that Montana’s laws governing political campaigns were violated.
In my opinion, tracing campaign finance reports is more important than investigating complaints — and the current finance reporting system is an abomination. Yes, we can obtain online copies of the C-5 reports of contributions and expenditures, but those reports are graphic images in a PDF container. It’s a paper system. Digitizing the data and converting them to a database so that they can be analyzed is a labor intensive process, slow and as a practical matter out of reach of virtually everyone.
An electronic filing system — Campaign Tracker — has been in the works since at least 2004. It still isn’t operational. That’s largely the fault of the legislature, which refuses to go digital. It isn’t just that some legislators are digital ignoramuses: many do not want to make it easy for the citizens of Montana to track and analyze campaign contributions. Still, Political Practices has tried moving toward electronic reports.
That’s why this sentence in Adam’s report in today GFT caught my eye:
Gallik said he has had conflicts with the staff over an initiative to mandate statewide candidates begin filing campaign finance reports using the online Campaign Tracker website beginning in March.
Could that conflict be at the bottom of the staff mutiny? And if so, who was on which side, and what were the arguments about?