Campaign spending records go online.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

Oregon voters are about to benefit from a quantum leap in the amount and quality of information available about campaign donors and the money that sways state and local elections.

Early this year, the state launched an online campaign finance database and began requiring all candidates and officeholders to report, within 30 days of receipt, all the donations they get. The deadline shrinks to seven days in the six weeks before each election.

The new system allows anyone with Internet access to easily see which individuals, companies and interest groups are donating money to politicians.

The continuous online reporting is a huge leap forward from the cumbersome paper reports that PACs and candidates previously had to file at set - and often distant - intervals.

Now, activists will be able to use the state Web site to check as often as they like on the latest receipts and expenditures of a candidate or political action committee.

If knowledge is power, the new database makes Oregon citizens more powerful than people in most - and maybe all - other states.

"Oregon is on the cutting edge of disclosure changes that many states are considering. Other states will be keeping a close eye on Oregon," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, which studies disclosure laws and practices in the 50 states.

The Oregon Legislature ordered creation of the database in 2005 on the heels of a discovery that once-powerful member Dan Doyle lied on campaign finance reports.

Doyle, a House Republican, resigned and later pleaded guilty to 11 felony counts of filing false reports. He was sentenced to 10 months in jail.

"They were embarrassed by the Doyle case," said John Lindback, Oregon elections director. "They felt it important that they restore public faith and toughen (the system) up."

A lowly rank

Lawmakers found that Oregon ranked low among states for the quality of its campaign finance disclosure. On the California Voter Foundation grading scale, it merited a C-minus, down there with Oklahoma, Missouri and Kentucky.

The state had only recently begun putting scanned images of candidate campaign finance reports on the Internet. The images of the paper reports could not be searched electronically. That made it cumbersome to figure out, for example, which big donors were giving to multiple campaigns.

Lindback wasn't happy with the status quo, especially because Oregon has no limits on the amount of money that donors can give. And donations are skyrocketing.

Last year's gubernatorial race grossed a combined $13 million; Last year's face-off for the District 7 Senate seat in Lane County between Vicki Walker and Jim Torrey came in at $1 million; Earlier, the Kitty Piercy-Nancy Nathanson race for the post of Eugene mayor broke six figures.

"When you have no limits ... timely and accurate disclosure is extremely important," Lindback said.

The state has spent $1.2 million on the database so far, Lindback said. The eventual addition of other features will bring the total to $3 million. Most of the money will come from federal elections improvement grants, he said.

The database went live Jan. 1. Since then, 800 candidates and committees have logged in the public database each donation they received and each expenditure they made - for a total of 30,000 transactions.

Under the old system, political action committees didn't have to report the money they collected or spent until September - leaving as much as eight months of political activity in the dark.

That won't do in the Internet age, Alexander said. "Why we should have huge gaps of time between when contributions are made and when they're reported?" she asked.

This year, for the first time, voters can track how much key political action committees have in their coffers during the Legislative session. For example, the Oregon PERS Retirees is reporting $43,408; the Oregon Restaurant PAC, $63,961; and the Oregon Medical PAC $140,695.

The database system adopted by the Legislature requires candidates and PACs to enter their contribution and expenditure records in a standard format on a Web-based form.

The public, journalists and other political watchdogs then have instant access to the standardized data. Gone are the trips to Salem to dig through paper records. Watchdogs can download the data into an Excel spreadsheet with the click of a button.

The law requires every political candidate in the state to file on the Web-based system, so it's possible to track the activities of city councilors and county commissioners - and their donors.

That feature can bring a level of sophisticated number crunching down to the local level. The system will allow watchdogs to track the activity of major donors - such as Lane County's big-spending timber barons - at every level of government.

Tracking political groups

The database will bring more transparency to PACs.

At the state level, donors give to a PAC, which gives to another PAC, which gives to another PAC that gives to candidates. When the money changes hands multiple times, it becomes difficult to trace it back to the original donors.

Sarah Wetherson of the Portland-based Money in Politics Research Action Project, for example, spent weeks last fall untangling the series of PACs supporting Measure 48 - which would have imposed a cap on state spending and created a state rainy day fund.

A PAC called the "Rainy Day Amendment Fund" supported the measure. Wetherson found out that group's money came from the Taxpayers Association of Oregon.

Digging deeper, she found that the taxpayer group's money came from an out-of-state PAC called Americans for Limited Government. Voters trashed Measure 48, in part, analysts said, because of the out-of-state funding.

With the new searchable electronic database, Wetherson would be able to follow the money by simply clicking on the names of the PACs until she found the original source of the money.

"You can follow the money in a really simple and straightforward way," Wetherson said.

But the system won't necessarily detect whether candidates lie on the records they submit.

"If somebody wants to game a system, they probably could find a way to do it. It depends on whether they're honest or not," said Lori Piercy, a Rainier political consultant who handles campaign expenditure records for 15 clients, including state-level candidates and PACs.

The disgraced lawmaker, Doyle, for example, reported that his campaign sent checks to printers, radio stations, consultants and others - but the businesses said they never received the payments.

The new system wouldn't automatically detect a similar scam, but with the expenditure data readily available to the public, similar lies might be more quickly exposed.

ORESTAR

See the state's new, continuous political campaign contribution and expenditure reporting system that brings the ability to follow the money to every Internet-equipped computer in the state:

Go to: www.sos.state.or.us /elections/. Find the ORESTAR links in red letters on the lower right side of the screen. Click on "campaign finance public search." There's no need to register to view or download data from the system.