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For a bit more background: in general, House and Senate campaigns use the same software to manage their campaign contribution data, and this software is capable
by apendleton 8y ago
For a bit more background: in general, House and Senate campaigns use the same software to manage their campaign contribution data, and this software is capable of doing electronic submission (because the House requires it), but the Senate instead prints it all out and hands it in paper, because they're the worst, and then it all gets typed back in again at a cost to the taxpayer of about $250k per filing deadline (how many of those per year there are varies -- they get more frequent closer to elections). The main motivation for the unwillingness to change things here isn't that they like the inaccuracies so much as that they like the delay -- it effectively means the last couple of pre-election filings aren't public until after the election, rather than, you know, instantly.
- everybodyknows 8y agoArticle says McConnell is the blocker of electronic filing. Anyone know about his own campaign finances in the last few months before elections?
- apendleton 8y agohttps://www.opensecrets.org/ https://www.opensecrets.org/ is a good resource, but honestly (having worked on money on politics stuff for several years) none of it is that juicy in isolation. Everybody gets money from everybody. For the most part they're not scared of any particular story coming out, they'd just rather not have a "In the final days of the campaign, X for $Y from Z" story come out the day before the election at all, for any Y or Z (it looks bad pretty much regardless of who it is: banks, pharmaceuticals, defense, lobbyists, energy, whatever)