It’s been a long time in coming, but Mississippi took a step forward last week in making it easier for the public to keep up with who is giving money to politicians and how they are spending it.
Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, after several years of prodding from the media and good government groups, finally put the money into developing an electronic filing system for campaign finance reports. Mississippi is the last state to make e-filing available.
Up to now, campaign finance reporting in Mississippi has been all done on paper, with the secretary of state providing what is essentially a photo of those paper records on its website.
The advantage of electronic records, for the media and anyone else interested in doing the research, is that it makes it much easier to track the flow of campaign funds.
As an example, say you want to know how much and to whom a specific donor has given money. In the current system, you would have to call up all the paper records for all the possible beneficiary candidates and search them manually — a time-consuming process. With electronic recordkeeping, though, all you have to do is type in the name of the donor, hit a couple of more keystrokes, and within seconds have all the information.
Although the e-filing system is a great improvement, it will only be as good as the number of candidates and political committees that use it. At least for the next few years, that will be up to their discretion, since Hosemann does not have the legal authority to mandate online filing of these records. He said he will be pushing in the 2017 legislative session, among other campaign-finance reforms, to require online filing for all statewide, district and legislative offices beginning in 2020.
Such a requirement needs to be enacted. Not only is online filing good for public accountability, it’s also more efficient for both the candidates and the taxpayers. The Secretary of State Office will no longer, for instance, have to spend all that labor scanning in paper documents.
Statewide candidates should certainly have the sophistication to handle online filing, although Hosemann expects some lawmakers may be intimidated by going paperless. We don’t see why. Based on the demonstration we watched last week of how the site works, it’s not any more complicated than filing income tax returns online. If lawmakers can’t figure the process out themselves, staff members with the secretary of state will walk them through it. If it’s still beyond them, the technologically challenged can hire an accountant, or get their teenage relatives, to handle the online reporting for them.
If there is resistance to making online filing mandatory, most likely it will not be because of some web-based phobia. Rather, those who stand in the way will be doing so because of an intentional desire to make it harder for the public to keep up with who is giving them and their political allies money.
Tim Kalich, Greenwood Commonwealth
