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State’s campaign finance reports to go online
By Molly Parker
Staff Writer
South Carolina citizens next year can expect to have online access to lawmakers’ campaign finance disclosure reports, a feature already offered by nearly every other state in the nation.
“The target (completion date) is actually later this year. It’s in development right now,” said Jeff McCartney, general manager of South Carolina Interactive LLC, the Columbia-based company that runs the state’s Web services.
The state’s failure to offer quick access to such reports via the Internet twice earned South Carolina close to a last-place ranking in a national report examining states’ campaign disclosure laws.
In 2003 and 2005, the “Grading State Disclosure” report, a collaborative study by the UCLA School of Law, the Center for Governmental Studies and the California Voter Foundation placed South Carolina 49th in the nation. Only Wyoming fared worse.
The report called the state’s campaign finance laws a “strong point,” but criticized the state’s failure to post the disclosure reports online, and for charging 50 cents per page for paper copies.
“I can’t think of a state that doesn’t have both (legislative and constitutional officers) filing online,” said Will Barrett, program manager for the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on issues where technology and politics intersect.
“As more filings come online, it will put the state more in line with the national practice,” he said.
With the changes, Barrett said, South Carolina’s score may improve in the next study set to be released later this year.
In 2006, for the first time, all statewide constitutional officers were required to file online, giving citizens quick access to the candidates’ quarterly filings.
The reports detail the amount of money a candidate lent himself or herself, how much is in the fund, the names of contributors giving more than $100, and a list of how the money was spent.
The ethics commission wanted a system up fast for the constitutional officers, but “it wasn’t meant to be the long-term solution,” McCartney said.
The new system that will require all statewide and legislative candidates to file online is a more advanced system, he said, and is therefore taking longer to finalize.
In addition to the mandated online filings, local candidates will have the option, but will not be required, to file online, said Herb Hayden, executive director of the S.C. State Ethics Commission. The commission will manually enter data from candidates who do not file online.
“Our objective is to get everybody filing online and we’re going to try to do that through education,” Hayden said. “Realistically, we know there are going to be people who will not do it for various reasons.”
The new system will also have advanced search features that will allow the grouping of contributors by zip code, office and amount given. A user could search, for instance, the names of everyone who contributed the maximum $1,000 in an election cycle, Hayden said.
Before online filing, only the hard copy of the reports could be viewed at the State Ethics Commission’s Columbia office or at the various county clerks of court offices, though Hayden said there is “no rhyme or reason” to the manner in which the records are filed at the local level.
The online database was required as part of an ethics disclosure reform package passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Sanford in 2003. Still, it was three years later before the constitutional officers’ filings appeared online.
“South Carolina is really behind the curve. In the information age, the time has come to give that access to anyone who wants access at any time,” said Joel Sawyer, spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford.
Along with slow implementation of an online database, the organizations charged with studying disclosure laws also criticized South Carolina’s practice of purging records once they turn four years old.
Hayden said there is “no need to keep anything past four years” because there is a four-year statute of limitations on failing to disclose or other violations of the law.
Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit organization focused on state and local campaign financing laws, called that practice “unbelievable.”
“That’s very unusual,” he said. “They should be holding the records for state races forever.”
With the online system, Hayden said he thinks the records will be kept as long as space allows on the server. Before, the records were cleared when the file cabinets were “too packed to get more in them.”
Molly Parker is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at mparker@charlestonbusiness.com.
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