Aug 95

Vendors: none

Jurisdictions: City and County of San Francisco, State of Washington, Federal Elections Commission;





By Jim Warren

Ed. Note: Jim Warren is currently serving on the California Secretary of State's Electronic Filings Advisory Panel that is mandated to submit recommendations to the state Legislature by the end of 1995, regarding how to implement computerized filing of and public access to campaign financial disclosures and required lobbyist reports. He wrote the original 28-page, 1994 generic plan for how to do it at very low cost, which was the basis for current legislation and was the starting point for the panel's study.

Various state and county jurisdictions are seeking computerized filing of and access to financial disclosures, lobbyist reports, etc. For instance:

+ In mid-1993, the City and County of San Francisco mandated that all local candidates and committees receiving or spending $5,000 or more in a calendar year must file in computerized form, and they have made those reports available on diskettes since its 1994 ad hoc implementation.

+ For several years, Washington state has received certain state filings in paper form and re-keyed them into a microcomputer for somewhat timely local dial-up access in the state capitol.

+ Current California legislation would require computerized filing of - and free online public access via the Internet to - financial disclosures, and the Secretary of State's Electronic Filings Advisory Panel has been mandated by law to submit recommendations to the Legislature by the end of 1995, about how best to implement such filings and access.

+ Some other state and local jurisdictions permit voluntary computerized filings, giving the delusion of modern filing and access without its substance - since most serious campaigns decline when permitted to do so.

+ The Federal Elections Committee accepts filings only in paper form, pays more than $100,000 a year to re-key and re-key-verify the data - that for the most part, was computer-printed in the first place - and then a private contractor charges $20 per hour for online access, bit by bit, for well-funded researchers. Mere voters are functionally excluded. The FEC has been thinking about enhanced access - and appears likely to continue to think about it for some years.

Federal laws would need to be changed, and congressional incumbents seem little-interested in serving the public interest in this way. Although incumbent legislators often first view this as increasing the exposure of their own records, they often brighten when they realize that it increases ease of access to their opponents' filings, and lowers their own costs for opposition research and their own entire, consumptive filing quagmire.



HOW TO DO IT

It's time that jurisdictions permit computerized filings to replace paper for all required disclosures and require them for all disclosures involving "serious" funds. For example, $30,000 appears to be a realistic threshold for mandatory digital disclosures in useful form for California state offices. Here's how:

1. The filing agency should provide a complete description of one or several compatible, nonproprietary computer formats -probably fixed-field formats such as dBASE uses, or comma-separated (quoted) values (CSV), as most spreadsheets use. The formats should focus on making the data available in useful, manipulatable, computable form; NOT slavishly follow current paper forms, and NOT designed primarily to facilitate their printing.

2. For those filers that are not eager to buy or develop fancy filing software, the filing agencies should provide data entry programs for at least Macs and PCs, guaranteed to produce datafiles in the required format - offered without cost, on 50-cent diskettes, replacing similar-cost paper mounds that are currently provided.

3. Each filer would have to find a computer - as a loaner, lease, purchase, or rented at a local copy shop - and have someone keyboard the data in place of