Personally, I find it appalling that the Senate still files their campaign finance disclosures on paper. The House of Representatives went electronic with their disclosures in 2001, and several bills to update the Senate’s procedures have been pending in Congress since 2003. The Senate’s insistence on paper filing costs taxpayers $250,000 per year and, more importantly, creates a disclosure blind-spot that allows 4-6 weeks of campaign contributions to stay invisible to the public until after each election.

There has been a serious push by both citizens and senators in the current session of Congress to pass S.223, a bill to require Senate candidates to file their campaign finance forms electronically. But despite its 42 bipartisan co-sponsors, the bill has been blocked by a few Senate Republicans, most recently John Ensign (R-NV), who are demanding that the bill include an unrelated and controversial amendment to require watchdog groups to disclose their donors.

If the disclosure blind-spot is to be fixed before the Senate elections in November, this bill must be passed as soon as the Senate returns from recess on September 8th.

Thankfully, seven good government reform groups have just initiated an aggressive campaign to pressure the Senate into doing whatever has to be done to get the bill passed. Pass223.com was launched today. It’s a collaborative project that asks you to call your senators and, if she’s not co-sponsoring the bill, ask her to support it; and if she’s already a co-sponsor, thank her and ask her to oppose the Ensign amendment.

If you need more encouragement to pick up the phone and call, consider the absurdity and wastefulness of the way things are done currently:

>Instead of quickly downloading their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where – wait now – they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill – perhaps 10,000 pages – is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.

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