Off the Beat: Why Do U.S. Senate Candidates File Paper in Digital Age?
It’s time for Congress to usher U.S. Senate candidates into the 21st century, and require them to file campaign finance reports electronically.
Unlike candidates for other federal offices, Senate hopefuls still file paper copies of their quarterly campaign finance reports. This goes for sitting senators, too, and the process is costlier, more time-consuming and introduces more opportunities for error than digital filing.
Paper filings also hinder the public’s ability to track donors, since digital sorting requires citizens to manually enter data first. As the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call put it in a February 2011 editorial, “the data can’t be searched, say, for connections between donors and positions Senators may have taken on issues.”
While Congress mandated electronic filing for other candidates more than a decade ago, the U.S. Senate found a way to exempt itself from the law. The Secretary of the Senate processes these candidates’ reports before sending them to the Federal Election Commission, and the law only applies to those who file directly to the FEC.
Reports that are filed electronically — those that come from U.S. House or presidential candidates, for example — can be downloaded within minutes. But it takes days and sometimes weeks for a Senate candidate’s reports to reach the public.
The commission has urged Congress to extend electronic filing requirements to Senate candidates for years, but attempts to change the process — which would also eliminate paper filing for incumbent senators — have been met by Republican-led resistance the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Senate exemption gets particularly murky when the lag between a campaign finance report and public access to it spans an election. In other words, voters don’t always know where the money to elect a senator is coming from before they go to the polls.
The FEC is pushing for a change from a purely practical standpoint.
“Compared to data from paper reports, data from electronically filed reports is
received, processed and disseminated more easily and efficiently, resulting in better use
of resources,” the FEC wrote in its . “In fact, the Commission estimates at least $430,000 per year in costs directly attributable to current Senate filing procedures would be saved by requiring electronic filing.”
Electronic filing would also save money for candidate committees, and remove a step in the filing process that introduces errors. Civil Beat tracked one such processing snafu this week.
Both the FEC and the — which processes reports sent to the Secretary of the Senate — said they had a copy of the year-end quarterly report from former Congressman Ed Case‘s U.S. Senate campaign, which was due Jan. 31.
The FEC even a “failure to file” reminder. But Case insisted he had filed his report.
Eventually, the Senate Public Records Office realized that . A staffer told Civil Beat that he mistook a copy of the year-end report for a duplicate of an earlier quarterly report, saying that the delay in getting Case’s report to the public was his fault “totally.”
The current filing process for U.S. Senate candidates is outdated, needlessly costly and time-consuming, and unnecessarily introduces the possibility of errors. Requiring electronic filing for all federal candidates would also improve the public’s ability to make sense of campaign finance data.
