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 current hand-written or typewritten entries. The data-entry program should allow editing and correction, and its output could be used by other campaign-support software, as available. Filers would submit their datafiles on a diskette, or by standard online file transfer.
4. The filers and filing agencies should have matching file-certification software that could read the datafile and verify that it is in an approved format. For security, a "message digest" should be run, computing a value that is functionally unique to the exact character-sequence that makes up the entire file. (MD5 is one of several standard public routines that are widely available.) This can be re-computed at any time. Any change indicates that the file has been corrupted.
5. When filers have a datafile ready for submission, they should (1) run the verification program to assure that the data is still in an approved form, then (2) compute its message digest, which can be represented as a sequence of perhaps 50 characters. It can be printed on a single sheet of paper, perhaps with affidavit language for the filer's signature - two signed originals being faxed or mailed when the datafile is submitted.
Upon receipt, the agency should use matching software to (1) re-verify the datafile format, and (2) re-compute the message digest value, then make back-up copies, automatically re-certifying each copy. Agency staff might countersign the one-page affidavits with their verified message digest, returning one as a receipt to the filer and archiving the other for use if the datafile integrity is ever questioned.
6. Thereafter, re-certified copies of the datafile can be placed on agency computers for:
+ In-house paperless public review via local and remote agency terminals,
+ User-controlled, self-service printing of excerpts or copies on a front-counter printer (also available for staff), without cost unless the total per-instance cost of staff monitoring, billing, accounting and paperwork is less than the incremental cost of self-service operation,
+ Staff duplication upon request on staff-approved Mac and PC diskettes that must include re-certification, and
+ Free online public "read-only" access for copying via "the largest, nonprofit, nonproprietary cooperative computer network," i.e., the Internet.
Data-format specifications should be included with each datafile copy on diskette and online. Message digest software and values for all datafiles should be included with each diskette copy and freely available online, allowing recipients - including original filers - to independently re-certify datafiles at any time.
7. The filing agency's public terminals and on-demand printouts provide access that is noticeably better than what is currently available from user-demolished paper files scrambled in banks of file cabinets.
The remaining access is a major enhancement over current practice. The agency should provide basic public access, but leave it to outside non-profit and for-profit organizations to implement enhanced access, for free and for fee - with no restriction on re-use and re-distribution of accurate copies and excerpts of datafiles - within the limits of permitted uses for such data.
There are numerous additional details, but this illustrates most of the operation and implies most of the significant cost-centers.
Jim Warren received the James Madison Freedom of Information award, the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in its first year. He founded the Computers, Freedom & Privacy conferences and InfoWorld magazine. Warren lives near Woodside, Calif. e-mail/jwarren@well.com.
