April 17, 2010 04:26 AM UTC

Bennet and Romanoff Want to Clean Up Washington?

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• by: ThillyWabbit

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

They could start by committing to a little campaign finance transparency.

Candidates for the House of Representatives and the Presidency electronically file lists of their donors and expenses. Not so U.S. senators, who have long exempted themselves from mandatory electronic filing of campaign reports, holding fast to an archaic system of filing their reports with the Secretary of the Senate.

This cumbersome and expensive process requires the Senate to print out these reports and deliver them to the FEC, which must then spend about $250,000 and untold hours having the records typed in, line by line, to the FEC’s databases.

Senator Bennet says that Washington is broken. I agree. There’s a step he can take right now to help fix it–file his FEC report electronically.

And Andrew Romanoff, who wants us all to know that his money is pure as the driven snow, should prove it. Rather than keeping his donors and fundraising totals a secret, he should be transparent about who is funding his campaign and file electronically.

This is what we have to deal with to read who these candidates are getting their money from. That’s less than fax resolution. It’s about 72 DPI, and these politicians print the reports in the smallest possible font so as to make them impossible to read when scanned.

That’s how the Senate has always worked–it’s a good old boy’s club that doesn’t want people to know what’s going on. And all of Colorado’s candidates from both parties are willingly perpetuating that secrecy. They could voluntarily choose to file electronically, but they don’t. And it doesn’t say that any of them are particularly interested in cleaning up Washington.