Oakland company tasked with bringing Federal election finance out of the shadows

“We’re an idealistic bunch,” Chen said of himself and the 26 people who work at Captricity. “I would call us the opposite of Beltway bandits.” 

Chen’s company is part of a group that won a one-year $270,000 contract with the Federal Election Commission. Its mission will be to drag the Senate, mewling and scratching, into the digital age, though not until next year, after the Nov. 4 election.
Forgive me my rant; I’ve written this before. But U.S. senators, in bipartisan form, insult voters by refusing to submit electronic versions of their reports disclosing donors who fund their campaigns. 

Rather than submit their campaign finance reports online to the Federal Election Commission as House and presidential candidates do, senators, in their arrogance, mail their reports to the Senate Office of Public Records, an ironic name.

The tradition of opacity is especially galling this year, when the Senate could flip from Democratic to Republican control, though neither party can claim the high road on this issue. No matter which party is in control, senators try mightily to block the unwashed masses from seeing who pays their way to Washington. 

Starting a week ago last Thursday, the Senate office began sending senators’ campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission. By last week, 180 reports comprising 114,619 pages had arrived. Senate Minority Leader McConnell, for example, filed an October report that runs 1,063 pages. His challenger’s report ran more than 10,000 pages.

Read the rest at the Sacramento Bee