Support for Electronic Filing of Senate Candidates' Campaign-Finance Records Gains Momentum

The only way you might have known about these and other major gifts would have been to leaf through the candidates' reports, each of which was about 3,400 pages long. North Carolina voters had it slightly better, but not much; the reports of major party candidates there were only 1,100 pages long.

The House started to make its disclosures simpler to obtain more than a decade ago. In 1995, the House began filing its reports directly with the FEC, and two years later it allowed the reports to be filed electronically. But the Senate took neither step, standing firm on the principle that it should control its own reports, a notion that one Senate aide summarized as "senatorial prerogative."

How this makes sense in an information age is hard to fathom.

Good Deed Bounty Hunting

The Sunlight Network is offering cash to citizens who do what it thinks is the "right thing." The nonprofit group is advertising that it will pay up to a total of $680,000 to people who persuade members of Congress, or prospective members, to agree to put their daily schedules on the Internet for all to see.

The Sunlight Network, which is affiliated with the Sunlight Foundation, thinks that it is well past time that voters knew who their elected representatives were meeting with and how often. But there's no way to find out short of publishing their schedules, something that is not required and, in fact, is never done.

So the network says that it will pay a cash fee of $1,000 to anyone who persuades a lawmaker to sign an agreement to disclose his or her daily calendar, and $250 to anyone who gets a candidate for Congress to do the same. The Sunlight Foundation is underwritten by securities lawyer and entrepreneur Michael R. Klein and headed by Ellen S. Miller, a longtime advocate for disclosure of campaign finances.

The organization takes its name from a quotation by former Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." Its goal is to shed light, or public attention, on candidates' big donors and lobbying contacts as a way to change government. But so far no one has taken advantage of this latest gimmick.

Jeffrey Birnbaum writes about the intersection of government and business every other Monday. His e-mail address iskstreetconfidential@washpost.com. He will be online to discuss Senate disclosures, "Mortgage Moms" and lobbyist-bashing on the campaign trail at 3 p.m. today at washingtonpost.com.