Senator Russ Feingold has proposed S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, which would force Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports electronically. This would make the files easier to organize and access and therefore make campaign financial records more transparent. There are also problems with the way we currently handle such records: they're entered by hand, which increases the possibility of error and takes a great deal of time, contributor information is put into the FEC database while expenditure information is not, and the whole process is done by independent contractor which costs the government a quarter of a million a year. Both Senate and Presidential candidates are already required to disclose their records electronically. So it seems like a no-brainer. But according to the Campaign Legal Center, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas is planning to insert a provision into the bill that might kill it entirely.
What's the provision? It would require full donor disclosure by any organization that files an ethics complaint against Senators. In other words, it would discourage organizations from making ethics complaints by potentially providing Senators who want to avoid them with political ammunition. As the CLC notes, the provision "is more likely to be used as a tool of intimidation than as a source of needed or valuable disclosure," and has little to do with making the financial doings of Senate candidates more transparent. Better record-keeping shouldn't be conditional on whether or not Senators are able to get better access to information about their potential critics, especially when they're the only ones still filing their financial disclosure forms in paper form.
-- A. Serwer