Electronic finance filings by candidates gain favor

 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL --11/25/14-- Arkansas Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson speaks Tuesday at a news conference at the state Capitol in Little Rock.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STATON BREIDENTHAL --11/25/14-- Arkansas Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson speaks Tuesday at a news conference at the state Capitol in Little Rock.

Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson and two Arkansas legislators say they'll push for new state laws in January to make it easier for the public to learn who is bankrolling the state's biggest political campaigns.

They hope to require statewide and districtwide candidates -- for governor, the Legislature, judgeships and other major contests -- to file their campaign-finance disclosure reports by computer, instead of turning in paper lists.

That would allow Arkansas voters and researchers to access a state website and view computerized databases of all campaign contributions in those races, making the contributions relatively easy to track and analyze.

Arkansas is among a dwindling handful of states that still accept paper campaign-finance disclosure reports -- handwritten or typed and posted page-by-page online. Researchers can spend days or weeks recording and sorting the donor information for just one statewide race, an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette survey in August found.

Shortly before the Nov. 4 election, Hutchinson said in an interview that articles in the Democrat-Gazette this year had "emphasized the point as to how important it is" to file campaign-finance disclosure reports electronically -- and had helped persuade him to back new laws on them.

"I would absolutely support more transparency and a requirement for filing campaign reports for statewide candidates in electronic form," Hutchinson said.

"It would be more accessible and searchable."

Hutchinson still plans to support the measure, a spokesman said recently.

Sen. Jon Woods, R-Springdale, said last week that he "will carry it in the [state] Senate," referring to legislation to require electronic filing by candidates in major campaigns.

"The Internet has been around since the '80s and heavily commercialized since the '90s," Woods said. "It's time for lawmakers to lead by example with present-day technology."

Woods was one architect of ethics changes -- in Ballot Issue 3 -- that Arkansas voters passed Nov. 4. The now-constitutional amendment forbids legislators from accepting almost anything of value from lobbyists, bans corporate campaign contributions, lengthens term limits and sets up a citizens commission to set elected officials' salaries.

Newly elected Republican House member Jana Della Rosa of Rogers said she will steer the proposed legislation through the House. Rep. Warwick Sabin, D-Little Rock, is also studying the plan. Sabin was involved in drafting legislation in January 2013 that included a push for candidates to file contribution reports into electronic databases, though the issue didn't get enough legislative support at the time. He was also an architect of Ballot Issue 3.

Della Rosa is interested in requiring that all candidates who file campaign-finance disclosure reports with the Arkansas secretary of state's office to submit their information electronically, she said last week.

That change should cover all major races.

State law Arkansas Code Annotated 236 (a) now requires all candidates -- except those running for local offices such as "school district, township, municipal or county office" -- to file campaign donations and spending reports with the secretary of state.

Della Rosa is investigating costs, but the state already has in place a working electronic filing system for campaign-finance reports. However, its use is optional for candidates. Many in the state's most-talked-about races have chosen to file paper reports.

In the Arkansas governor's race this year, for example, Hutchinson and his Democratic opponent, former U.S. Rep. Mike Ross, filed paper documents that reported raising a total of almost $10.7 million through Oct. 31.

The only way voters could examine that information was to leaf through hundreds of pages of contributions that ranged from roughly $50 to $2,000 each.

A Democrat-Gazette review in the fall found that all of Arkansas' neighboring states, except Mississippi, had some form of required electronic reporting of campaign finances.

Della Rosa said she hopes a measure requiring electronic filing passes early in the legislative session, which starts Jan. 12.

"There's a lot of interest in it on the part of some of the legislators," she said.

She believes that requiring only the biggest campaigns to file electronically will make the measure easier to pass.

Graham Sloan, director of the Arkansas Ethics Commission, said it would be more difficult to require electronic filing by all candidates, including those in smaller, local races. The commission serves as the enforcement agency for Arkansas' ethical conduct rules and disclosure laws that govern candidates for public office and other election matters.

County and school board candidates, for example, file paper reports with the county clerks, and municipal candidates with the city clerks or recorders, Sloan said. Switching over all those candidates to electronic filing with the secretary of state would add thousands more users to the current electronic system that was installed in 2006.

Generally, Sloan wrote in an email: "I think it's safe to say the [ethics] commission views online filing favorably and would be supportive of efforts to make online filing mandatory for more groups."

Campaign donation and spending reports filed online "are easier to read," he continued. "Unlike paper reports, which require scanning and posting, there isn't a delay in making them available in an electronic format. Also, online filing systems do the addition and subtraction for the person preparing the report, which reduces mathematical errors. There's also a reduction in the usage and storage of paper."

Officials with the National Institute on Money in State Politics expressed happiness that Arkansas is considering mandatory online campaign-finance filing. The Helena, Mont., nonprofit examines and reports campaign-finance information for races in all 50 states.

"When data is available only in ... paper reports, fundamental questions like 'how much money did this candidate get from outside of the state?' and 'which candidates did this company/union support?' can only be answered through a time-consuming process of tediously keying the data into spreadsheets for analysis," the institute's research director, Peter Quist, wrote in an email.

"This is a prohibitively high barrier to government transparency.

"We applaud the effort in Arkansas to create an electronic filing requirement."

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