Testimony of Ellen S.

Miller, Executive Director The Sunlight Foundation Before the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration Hearing on the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act April 25, 2012 Mr. Chairman, Senator Alexander, members of the Committee, thank you very much for the opportunity to submit testimony on behalf of the Sunlight Foundation. My name is Ellen Miller and I am the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation. The mission of the non-partisan Sunlight Foundation is to use cutting-edge technology to make government transparent and accountable. Before founding Sunlight, I was deep in the campaign finance trenches. First, as a founder of the Center for Responsive Politics, the nations premire money and politics data crunching organization. Later, I created Public Campaign, a nonprofit that pioneered the concept of a system of full public financing. Given my background, you can imagine my interest in ensuring that accurate campaign finance information is publicly available online in a timely manner. S. 219, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, accomplishes that simple goal. This commonsense, bipartisan bill requires Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically, as House candidates, presidential candidates and other political committees have been doing for many years. By virtue of the fact that these campaign reports are public information, they should be made available immediately. There is no rationale for delaying disclosure of the information. Possibly the most notable feature of this non-controversial legislation is that this hearing is necessary at all. This bill should have been enacted a decade ago. The current process by which Senate candidates file their campaign finance reports wastes time and money, not to mention paper. Senate campaign committees, maintain campaign finance data in a digital format, but rather than simply filing the information by hitting send on their computers, they deliver paper copies of the reports to the Secretary of the Senate. The Secretary of the Senate scans the reports and emails the images to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The FEC prints the documents so that the data contained in them can be keyed into FEC databases. Only then can the information searched and sorted electronically by the public. This procedure costs taxpayers of at least $250,000 per year.

This result of this cumbersome process is that the public is denied timely access to information that is required by law to be public and is critical to a functioning democracy. The outdated system is particularly troublesome in the days before an election, when there is more information filed and when delays may mean the public is denied vital information about campaign contributions and expenditures until after they have voted. There has never been any public opposition for this legislation, yet it has been stalled for years as the result of a series of anonymous holds and demands that the bill be linked with votes on non-germane, poison pill amendments. Indeed, Senators who otherwise claim to support full disclosure of campaign finances have led past efforts to keep this bill from being enacted. We hope the days of political gamesmanship surrounding this bill are over. We appreciate that you are holding a hearing to address this important piece of legislation, and urge each member of this Committee to support S. 219 and oppose any amendment that would impinge the bills chances of passage. The Senate can no longer exempt itself from mandatory electronic filing of campaign finance reports. The public has a right to know who is contributing to senators campaigns online and without a delay.