Tracking Campaign Finance Reports No Easy Matter

In these last few days before the election, the count rises by the hour of late contributions pouring into state political campaigns.

By law, the campaigns and their contributors must report the activity promptly, every day if necessary to update the accumulation of cash. But if you are of a mind to track a campaign’s checkbook supporters at this crucial stage, don’t expect the state to make it easy for you.

California government may use computers to record your tax return, check your driving record or take your lottery bet. But it can’t electronically produce a public record of political money--a condition that many suspect is just as most politicians want it.

Attempts to reform the system through so-called electronic filing have failed in the Legislature for several years.

“It’ll get there” eventually, said Assemblywoman Jackie Speier (D-Burlingame), of attempts by her and others to pass legislation making it possible for the public to monitor the flow of political money on the Internet.

It hasn’t happened so far, she said, because “anyone who raises huge amounts of campaign money perceives a vulnerability” from wider dissemination of their political finance information.

State Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), who watched his version of an electronic-filing bill die in a Senate committee, said this week that he will introduce an identical measure next year.

His last bill, he said, “was killed because of institutional aversion to easing public access” to campaign records.

Explanation, according to a legislative staffer who has observed the fate of the bills: “More people would find out where the money is coming from.”

That’s troubling to politicians, this source said, because when word gets around on the Internet that money is pouring in from outside a candidate’s district, contributions from inside the district could fall off.

Or worse, the source said, opponents of electronic filing often complain that millions of people peering at campaign records could have a chilling effect on the generosity of all donors.

In the meantime, campaign contribution and spending reports for public perusal exist solely on paper, heaps of it--more than half a million pages in 1994, according to Secretary of State Bill Jones, California’s top election official.

To attack the paper mountain, a citizen needs patience, stamina and possibly a full tank of gas.

Campaign finance records are available for viewing in Sacramento at the secretary of state’s office. Or, for incomplete results, at each county’s registrar of voters office. In Los Angeles County, the one location is an office in Norwalk.

The public interest group California Voter Foundation is posting contribution reports, updated daily, on the Internet (www.calvoter.org), but the information is confined to late contributions of $10,000 or more.

For the total picture, it’s stand in line and wait to view single copies of campaign finance reports.

At the secretary of state’s office in Sacramento, the data arrive in waves of dogeared paper reports--cresting at the end of official filing periods and during the late contribution period covering the two weeks before election day.

For the fall campaign this year, the bulges occurred in early and mid-October, with reporters, campaign workers, lobbyists and public interest researchers lugging thick reports to half a dozen Formica-topped tables to check who gave how much and who received it.

For the answers, one must sift through periodic reports, late reports, amendments to reports and reports of “independent expenditures” by contributors supposedly unconnected to the recipient campaign.

Staff workers of what is called the “political reform section” cheerfully oblige those who ask for help in negotiating the maze. Privately, they say campaign finance reporting is overdue to enter the computer age.

Their boss agrees.

“I either have to open up a whole new section with hundreds and hundreds of people with Xerox machines” or switch to electronic filing, Jones said in an interview.

He said he will tell the Legislature again next year: “Do one or the other. I cannot discharge my responsibility in the current environment.”

Nothing in either of the political reform measures on Tuesday’s ballot, Propositions 208 and 212, proposes solutions to the problem.

With electronic filing in place, Jones said, the state would supply contributors and campaigns with standard software. Recipients and donors, using their computers, would be required to file financial reports to a secretary of state’s office database. The contents would be accessible to anyone with a computer and modem.