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Sunlight Weekly Roundup: "Ignorance of the law is not a defense"

After footage of a tense city council meeting  in West Branch, Iowa  was posted on YouTube, City Administrator Matt Mucker suggested a rule that would have required the public to secure mayoral permission to record meetings. This measure would… [...]

Tools for Transparency: Google Reader is Still Relevant, Part III

In continuing with the “Google Reader is Still Relevant” meme (read Parts I and II here) I wanted to make a quick note on how I’m seeing extended value in Google Reader after integrating it with IFTTT.  Google Reader has morphed from a somewhat usefu… [...]

Sunlight on #superPACs: Colbert edition

In case you missed it, last night some-time South Carolina Presidential candidate and super PAC founder Stephen Colbert gave a great rundown of the new campaign finance landscape in our elections. Colbert and his team of very sharp writers have smartl… [...]

Our Omidyar Network Partners

Sunlight couldn’t be in better company in the following video shot by the Omidyar Network, a significant funder of our work. The interviews done at a recent event in Menlo Park, California includes leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation, BRAC, the Afri… [...]

Benchmarks for Measuring Success for Legislative Data Transparency

The following are my notes for remarks I delivered at the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on February 2, 2012. They’ve been updated to include hyperlinks, but were delivered largely as written. The official page for the conference … [...]

Super PACs and Secret Money Undermine Elections

The New York Times looked at this week’s Super PAC filings with the FEC and demonstrated—again—what we knew would be the result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision: The specter of hundreds of thousands of dollars of hidden money in… [...]

Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference

Many of us from Sunlight have been at the House’s legislative data conference today, as Daniel has noted on the blog. The conference organizers have done a fantastic job — the day has been like an all day committee hearing, where the House’s tech off… [...]

Tester and Cochran offer Electronic Filing Amendment to the STOCK Act

Senators Tester and Cochran, champions of common sense legislation that would require senators and senate candidates to electronically file their campaign finance reports, yesterday offered a version of their bill as an amendment to the STOCK Act. Sunlight applauds their effort and wrote a letter to all senators urging them to support the amendment.

Sunlight has long supported the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, a much needed and long overdue remedy to the absurd system in place in the Senate. Currently, senate candidates file their quarterly campaign finance reports with the Secretary of the Senate, who then prints them out on reams of paper and delivers them to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC then inputs the information contained in those reports into its computer databases. The archaic and costly process delays public access to information about who is funding Senate campaigns, sometimes until after the election takes place.

By contrast, senators’ counterparts in the House, as well as presidential candidates and PACs, have, for years, electronically filed their campaign finance reports directly with the FEC, avoiding the wasteful, duplicative and opaque senate system.

Versions of this Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act have been introduced with significant bipartisan support in multiple prior congresses. No Senator that we know of has ever publicly opposed the legislation. Yet it has not been enacted because it has been the victim of politics. Senator Mitch McConnell has repeatedly demanded that a vote on the electronic filing bill be linked to a vote on unrelated proposal that would, if enacted, actually decrease transparency by posing burdens on groups filing ethics complaints against any sitting senator.

By offering the electronic filing bill as an amendment to the STOCK Act, there is a real opportunity to make this piece of legislation law. We hope it comes up for a vote and that every senator supports it. There is no reason not to.

Letter to the Senate on Electornic Filing Amendment 2012-02-01-1

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STOCK Act Update

As the STOCK Act keeps marching through the Senate, on the heels of a State of the Union push from the President, and after a CBS news expose ignited interest in a longstanding proposal from Rep. Slaughter in the House, that Sunlight has supported. We… [...]

The presidential super PACs: five takeaways

The first round of SuperPAC annual filings came in yesterday, and we at Sunlight have been digging through them since. Our reporting team has been blogging the reports as we digest them. Below are five takeaway points, based on a Sunlight Foundation a… [...]