Rich Miller over at CapFax is asking for help explaining to the webmaster for the State Board of Elections that their new website is broken and somehow manages to suck even worse than their old, really sucky website.
Head over to the State Board of Elections’ website and try to look up a few candidate filings and campaign contributions. I was supposed to go over to the State Board myself and tell them how badly they screwed up their website, but I just don’t have time to hold their little hands through this disaster.
One of the big problems with campaign finance in Illinos is that the State Board of Elections collects a bunch of data, but they make it as inconvenient as possible for the public and press to access the data and pass it around. More ease of use and convenience and greater public and media access to the data would do more to clean up Illinois politics than an ineffective feel-good measure like a contribution ban, yet nobody talks about how badly the State Board of Elections is screwing this up. Their site is so broken that they're basically hiding campaign finance data from the very people they're supposed to be working for.
Please give him a hand if you have a few minutes.
"greater public and media access to the data would do more to clean up Illinois politics" -- say what?
I think everyone knows about the patronage system we've got in place, we've had it for easily a century and I don't think data access is really going illuminate us and what we all already know. If the federal courts that have both Chicago and Cook County can't end patronage, you really think people seeing how much dirty money, say Daley, gets is going to lead them to elect a Republican? Really?
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j
Part-Time Pundit
"If the federal courts that have both Chicago and Cook County can't end patronage, you really think people seeing how much dirty money, say Daley, gets is going to lead them to elect a Republican? Really?"
Who said it was about electing Republicans?
It's about allowing the public to easily access campaign finance data so they can judge for themselves what is corrupt, what appears to be corrupt, and what is not.
Mandatory, online reporting of all campaign contributions within two business days would do more to clean up Illinois government than any contribution ban. All that would be accomplished with a contribution ban would be to drive the money further away from disclosure requirements - see 527s on the Federal level for a great example. The best cure for corruption is sunshine, and an electorate which abhors corruption.
That's my point... Illinois' corruption **is** in the sunshine. Take a look at the Cook County Board... when offices can be passed down like hereditary titles from father to son and no one blinks, do you really think seeing who donates money is going to get democrats to turn on their own? We've had pay-to-play politics for decades... the only thing that 48 hours til online would give us is the latest names.
I wasn't commenting on a contribution ban, I was simply saying that if you think campaign contribution does anything in this state to end corruption you are sorely mistaken. We can get the data now... the Trib, even with the crappy ISBE website, was about to do a nice story on the governor's $25,000 club. Many news articles in the past have done the same thing.
And yet, we still have the same problems. Being able to contribute to the budget of Patrick Fitzgerald's office would do more to end corruption than ease of access to campaign contributions (and it's pretty good now, at least when the website works).
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j
Part-Time Pundit
"Illinois' corruption **is** in the sunshine."
No, it's not. Just because you know about some of it doesn't mean that most voters know about anything but the bare minimum.
"We can get the data now... the Trib, even with the crappy ISBE website, was about to do a nice story on the governor's $25,000 club. Many news articles in the past have done the same thing."
You can. I can. The Trib can. But not a single downstate paper will pick up that Trib story, or expand on it, because the reporting system sucks, and because the SBE makes things more difficult than they should be.