Light shines on campaign financing

Published 5:00 am Saturday, April 28, 2007

There’s a new way for voters to find out more about how candidates spend their money and where they got it from. And the best thing is, it should make it a whole lot easier to sleuth out what’s going on.

The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office has developed an electronic record keeping system called ORESTAR. It allows candidates to file their campaign finance information electronically for free. The real benefit to the rest of us is anybody with access to the Internet can log in and start nosing around.

Before the new online system, searching through campaign finance reports could mean taking a trip to Salem and sorting through stacks and stacks of reports. There was an upgrade that made PDF images of individual reports available. But that didn’t make it as easy as it is under ORESTAR to search a database of information.

The new electronic system could very well be called DanDoyleSTAR. In 2005, Salem Republican Rep. Dan Doyle was in a powerful budgetary position in the Legislature – he was one of the co-chairmen of the Joint Committee on Ways and Means. But he had used as much as $145,000 in campaign funds for himself and lied about it on campaign finance reports. After that episode, the Legislature wanted to make the records more accessible. The resulting bill required the creation of the new electronic reporting system.

Not only is the information easier to use under the new system, it’s more up-to-date. Under the old reporting system, reporting deadlines for campaigns were scheduled months apart. The system now requires that political committees report their financial transactions to the secretary of state within 30 days generally and within seven days in the six weeks just before an election.

ORESTAR has an 88-page instruction manual, which makes it appear like it might be way too complicated. Once you get into the Web site and start clicking around, it’s easy to manage without mastering the manual. The Web site is www.sos.state.or .us/elections.

In the end, ORESTAR is just a better tool. It’s up to voters and the media to use it. But anything that makes it easier to shed light on the flow of campaign money is worth it to us.