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Dark Ages Disclosure

THR EE YEARS AGO we wrote an editorial using the headline above. It decried the senseless and costly loophole under which people running for the Senate -- alone among federal political candidates and committees -- aren't required to file campaign finance reports electronically. In an age when such reports can be filed with the click of a mouse, Senate candidates submit their disclosures on paper, with weeks of delay before they are transferred to a form available and searchable on the Internet. As a result, in the final stretch of campaigns, anyone interested in learning who is bankrolling Senate candidates or how they are spending the cash has to go page by page through voluminous reports. This delay is so obviously unjustified that we expected the legal glitch to be quickly fixed....