Bill would require candidates to file finance reports online

A bill has been filed that would require candidates for constitutional, legislative and judicial offices in Arkansas to use an online campaign finance reporting system that could be searchable by the public.

House Bill 1427 would create a more transparent system, said its sponsor, Rep. Jana Della Rosa, R-Rogers. It needs a two-thirds vote because it modifies voter-initiated acts passed in 1990 and 1996. It would not apply to county or city candidates.

Current campaign finance reports can be filed by paper or online, and while they are viewable on the secretary of state’s website, votenaturally.org, they are not searchable. The only way a citizen can determine which donor has given how much and to whom is to check every single candidate’s report, an impossibly time-consuming task, Della Rosa said.

Della Rosa ran a similar bill during her first term in the Legislature in 2015, but it failed. Many legislators argued – correctly, she said – that the current online filing system is poorly constructed and makes mistakes.

Since then, $700,000 was appropriated in the 2016 fiscal session to purchase a new system that should be finished by the end of June, she said. She said she saw a demonstration of the system recently, and it worked much better.

Della Rosa believes the improved system should remove one of the opponents’ arguments.

“We’ve spent taxpayer money,” she said. “Now are we going to let them get anything out of it, or are we just going to say, ‘We spent $700,000 for our own convenience because we wanted a nice new system?'”

Other opponents said in 2015 that they did not have reliable internet access. To address that concern, the bill allows candidates to file an affidavit saying they do not have access to the technology needed to submit the reports online and that the submission would amount to “substantial hardship.” She said she thought the system is so much better that most candidates would want to use it.

Under the bill, candidates would have to choose at the beginning of an election cycle whether they are filing online or by paper and then must stick with the same method throughout. The Arkansas Ethics Commission would approve the format.

The bill has been assigned to the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee. Della Rosa expects to run it Wednesday.

She said her bill’s focus on transparency makes it an alternative to efforts to limit campaign donations, which she said is impossible.

“It’s like trying to hold water,” she said. “There’s going to be a leak somewhere. Somebody will find a way, because they have the desire to find a way, so everything that we try and limit, they just find a pathway around.”