

After over 15 years of legislative attempts, Senate candidates might finally start electronically filing their campaign finance reports.

Congress passed a bill last week that would require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance disclosures directly to the Federal Election Commission, rather than the Secretary of the Senate.

The provision is a part of a larger appropriations bill that now awaits President Donald Trump’s signature.

House of Representatives and presidential candidates have been electronically filing their disclosures to the FEC since 2001.

The Secretary of the Senate receives and processes thousands of pages of paper reports submitted by Senate candidates, and then sends the reports to the Federal Election Commission, which pays hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to turn the disclosures into data.

This means it can take weeks if not months for this information to reach the public. For House and presidential candidates, once their reports are filed, that information is almost immediately available to the public.

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The Center for Public Integrity found numerous mistakes produced by this archaic system. The investigation found errors in more than 5,900 candidate disclosures and were all traced back to the conversion of paper filings to electronic data.

Since 2003, members of Congress have tried to pass bills that would require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance disclosures directly with the FEC, which requires candidates to submit these reports electronically.

Since 2008, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) has tried every Congress to pass a version of this provision. This session, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act had over 50 bipartisan cosponsors, but it wasn’t brought to a vote. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) proposed that it be included as a provision in the 2019 spending bill.

“Jon has voluntarily e-filed his reports since he came to the Senate,” said Dave Kuntz, a spokesman for Tester’s office. “He believes this would bring more transparency and save taxpayers money.”

The Center for Responsive Politics has been supporting such legislation for years, even submitting testimony to the Senate rules committee in 2012.

“This provision reduces unnecessary bureaucratic red tape, and would save taxpayer dollars by having candidates for the U.S. Senate directly file to the Federal Election Commission, instead of the current practice,” Daines said in a press release.



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