Senate has Campaign Contribution Loophole

Jeff Birnbaum of the Washington Post has an eye-opening article about a major loophole in campaign contribution reporting that the Senate enjoys. Unlike the House, Senate candidates do not have to electronically file their campaign contributions. This delays access to these reports.

In one of the most controversial quirks in election law, candidates for Senate are not required to file their campaign-finance reports electronically. That means voters can't effectively find out how much and from whom their would-be senators have collected money until long after the election -- too late for them to act.

[...]

As it is, almost all senators and Senate candidates deliver their reports on paper (even though those reports are written on computers). The paper filings are laboriously scanned and then key-punched into an electronic system, a procedure that often takes six weeks to finish and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

After the reports are submitted to the Secretary of the Senate (often well past published deadlines), they are placed onto the Federal Election Commission's Web site in a page-by-page format. The listings are not searchable, which makes it almost impossible for anyone to glean useful information. Think of the process like rummaging through thousands of disorderly papers in a very large box.

The net result: Senators have insolated themselves from criticism that stems from their very important, end-of-campaign donations because they have denied voters accessible information when it would be most useful.