This is one of those niche issues that pops up in Washington regularly - and helps keep the government in low regard around the country.
Electronic disclosure - anyone campaigning for the US House, President and most major state offices, and many local offices for that matter, must file their campaign finance reports electronically. But if you're running for the US Senate, you file on paper. Here's how campaign finance expert Michael Malbin described the process:
The current situation is absurd. Senate campaigns keep their contribution records electronically anyway. What happens next is like a reporting machine designed by the old cartoonist, Rube Goldberg. As it stands now, Senate campaigns take their own electronic records, print them out on paper, ship the paper (cumulatively thousands of pages' worth) to the Secretary of the Senate, which the Secretary then copies to send to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then pays six figures of taxpayers' money to hire a contractor to retype the information into an electronic format!
Bizarre. Unbelievable. If the new Senate leadership doesn't get this fixed right away, you have to wonder about all their promises on tougher, more complicated issues.
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