Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS

By Mr. FEINGOLD (for himself and Mr. MCCAIN):

S. 1874. A bill to require Senate candidates to file designations, statements, and reports in electronic form; to the Committee on Rules and Administration.

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Mr. McCAIN. Mr. President, I am proud to join Senator RUSS FEINGOLD as a co-sponsor of legislation that will require Senate candidates to file campaign finance reports in electronic form. This bill will finally remove the exemption the Senate has given itself from an important requirement of campaign finance disclosure laws that apply to everyone else, including candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Political Action Committees, PACs.

Political committees active in federal elections must submit their quarterly financial reports for disclosure by the Federal Election Commission, FEC. Anyone interested can nearly instantaneously download the reports from the FEC website and conduct computer searches to learn about the contributions and expenditures of individual candidates for the House, non-Senate national party committees and PACs. The current problem is that they cannot do the same for Senate candidates and parties because of the Senate's insistence on paper rather than electronic filing. The FEC must do more processing of Senate paper reports than of House electronic ones. This involves printing or copying the Senate reports, up to 10,000 pages a day at times, hand-coding transactions that cannot be automatically processed, and keypunching the data into the electronic database. House electronic reports do not need the same treatment. The end result is that in contrast to the House, information from the Senate paper reports are often available well after the election has occurred.

Due to this problem, voters are not well-informed about the campaign finance information of their Senators and Senate candidates. For voters who want to consider the nature of the campaign finance support received by a Senate candidate and its relationship to Senate legislative votes as a factor in deciding for whom they will cast a vote, they clearly cannot.

To address this problem, our legislation requires Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Secretary of the Senate. Within 24 hours of receipt of those reports, the Secretary is required to forward those reports to the FEC. The FEC, in turn is required to make those reports available on the Internet within 24 hours as they do other reports. Therefore, electronic versions of Senate reports will be available to the public within 48 hours of their filing.

Electronic reports are not only transmitted instantly but are more accurate than paper submissions because software can easily correct mistakes. On the other hand, hand entering of data is always prone to error. Furthermore, the data in electronic reports can be rapidly searched via the Internet for answers to specific questions. Voters will no longer have to go through the time consuming process of reading pages and pages filed by Senate candidates or Senate party committees to figure out the major donors and their employers, and the major recipients of campaign spending. Instead, they can download a filed report from the FEC website onto their personal computers and quickly locate the information they need. This creates effective public disclosure.

The Senate's current failure to provide its constituents with electronically disclosed, timely information is unconscionable. Senate filings should follow the same criteria as other campaign finance reports. There must not be a separate standard for the Senate. Ironically, while they do not currently file electronically, Senators and Senate candidates already use electronic software in compiling their paper reports. If Senators and Senate candidates can use technology to run their offices and websites, why can't they use it to better inform their own constituents about how their campaigns are funded? Their constituents have earned a right to that information. The public interest will be better served and voters' faith in their elected leaders will be restored.