Each year,  the six commissioners of the Federal Election Commission unanimously agree on one thing: It’s long past time for the Senate to enter the 21st century.

But last week, only 19 senators filed their campaign finance reports electronically. The rest delivered their forms on paper, leaving it up to the FEC to upload thousands of scanned documents to its Web site and then send them to an outside contractor to manually enter all the data to make it searchable.

Most reasonable people agree this is ridiculous in 2015. We can think of only one reason to keep this archaic, dark ages practice — perhaps the same reason why, as our colleague David Fahrenthold reported last year, government workers’ retirement files are processed by hand, on paper in a mine —jobs!

Sure it takes way too much time and costs the taxpayers a ton of money. But people get paid to manually digitize all that Senate campaign finance data, so it’s basically an economic stimulus program.

Except not all of those jobs are in America.

The FEC paid IT company Aurotech $270,571 in fiscal 2014 for data entry services. Aurotech subcontracted Captricity, a California-based company that can digitize handwritten documents with incredible speed. It crowdsources using Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” workforce to employ people from all over the world to verify that words are translated accurately. (Disclaimer: Amazon chief executive Jeffrey Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Ann Ravel, the FEC commissioner, told the Loop that she was aware that the company used a “global workforce,” but didn’t want to comment on what message that sent, if any. Ravel, who was aware of Captricity’s work when she worked at the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said the FEC commissioners weren’t involved in securing this contract.

Brian Busch, Captricity’s public sector lead, said rough estimates are that about half the people finding work on Mechanical Turk are from India and 40 percent from North America.

Busch called the Senate’s paper filing “a strange policy situation” and commended the FEC for making an investment in a technological remedy — data entry that would take days, the Captricity program claims to do in hours.

So go on senators, brag about it. Your inexplicable hardheadedness is doing a world of good.