TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Kim Alexander, California Voter Foundation
DATE: May 28, 1997
RE: Online Disclosure -- Floor Votes & AmendmentsHi Folks:
I have some important news on AB 63/Cunneen, and SB 49/Karnette, two bills that would require mandatory electronic filing of, and online access to campaign disclosure records. This edition of CVF-NEWS will provide an update on the status of the bills, as well as information about recent amendments to AB 63 that would dramatically reduce the value of the online records.
Status on SB 49/Karnette and AB 63/Cunneen
Two electronic filing/online disclosure bills are currently pending before the California State Legislature -- SB 49, authored by Senator Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach) and AB 63, authored by Assemblyman Jim Cunneen (R-Cupertino). Both bills are currently in the Appropriations committees of their respective houses, and we should know by the end of this week whether they are voted out.
Senate Floor Vote on SB 49/Karnette expected on June 4th
If approved by the Appropriations committees, SB 49 will then go to the Senate for a floor vote, and AB 63 will go to the Assembly for a floor vote. These floor votes will mark the first time in the 1997-98 session that each of the 120 members of the California State Legislature will be voting on electronic filing/online disclosure.
I have been told by Senator Karnette's office that she is likely to take up SB 49 on the Senate floor on Wednesday, June 4th, during the morning. The session is open to the public, and I encourage all of you who are interested in this issue to plan on attending if you can. Please contact me if you need directions or want more information. The Senate floor debate will mark the first time since the 1993-94 session that the State Senate has considered electronic filing legislation, and the discussion is likely to be both interesting and informative. For those who can't attend, the California Channel is likely to televise the session, so you can watch at home if your cable station carries the California Channel (check their web site to find out).
To refresh your memory, SB 49 requires mandatory electronic filing of political disclosure records by the 2000 election cycle, and mandatory diskette filing by statewide candidates and ballot measure committees in 1998. SB 49 also directs the Secretary of State to publish the records on the Internet. Now is the time to write, fax, call or email your state legislators and share your thoughts with them -- it is very important that the 120 members of the Legislature appreciate the public's interest in this issue.
Recent amendments to AB 63 reduce online access to contributor data
As I have written in previous CVF-NEWS updates, privacy concerns continue to play a role in the development of the electronic filing bills. Most of us involved with electronic filing have agreed that it is important to balance the public's right to know with a contributor's right to privacy, and believe that the best way to deal with this issue is to eliminate a contributor's street address from the online records, while retaining their city, state and zip code for identification purposes. The street address would continue to be reported, but would be omitted from the online records, in effect crippling the online database for commercial use and providing campaign contributors with a reasonable amount of privacy. This has, in fact, become the national standard, and if you look at the online data made available through Federal Election Commission records via Web sites like FECinfo and the Center for Responsive Politics, you'll see that the street address information is excluded, while city, state and zip are retained.
As originally introduced, Jim Cunneen's AB 63 tried to address privacy concerns by creating new crimes against those who used the data to harass someone, or for commercial purposes. Assembly Member Cunneen amended the controversial language out of his bill at the request of Consumers Union, but in the process of doing so, he added new language that would, in addition to omitting the street address, omit a donor's city and town information as well.
After I read these amendments, I went back and checked California's disclosure laws because I wasn't sure if the zip code information was even required to be disclosed in the first place; sure enough, the Political Reform Act specifies that a donor must disclose his or her "street address", with no mention of zip code data. I then checked the Fair Political Practices Commission's regulations, and they only require donors to disclose the street address, city and state - again, no zip code data.
While in practice many candidates file their donors' zip code data, the fact is, they aren't required by law to do so. In effect, as it is currently written, if Jim Cunneen's AB 63 were to become the law, the only information about a donor that we could access on the Internet would be his or her name, occupation, employer, and state. SB 49, on the other hand, would provide a donor's name, occupation, employer, city and state.
Without either city or zip code data, the online records will be much less meaningful. For example, we would not be able to look at the online records and know how much a candidate is raising from inside the district. It would be much more difficult to positively identify a donor, especially given the fact that many candidates fail to disclose their contributors' occupation and employer information. Omitting city data would mean that California's online disclosure system would not conform with what has become the national standard.
Jim Cunneen's new amendments also omit phone numbers from the online records. While donors' phone numbers are not required to be disclosed, the phone number of the candidate's treasurer is included in the reporting requirements and would, therefore, not be available online under Cunneen's AB 63.
Those of you who are interested in contacting Assembly Member Cunneen about his amendments can reach him via email at jim.cunneen@assembly.ca.gov, or via his Capitol office -- (916) 445-8305.
I will be posting another CVF-NEWS update as soon as there is any news out of the Appropriations Committees. In the meantime, I hope many of you will plan on coming to Sacramento on Wednesday, June 4th for the State Senate floor vote, and remember that past electronic filing updates, as well as other resources about Internet access to disclosure records, are available at CVF's Digital Sunlight Web site, at www.digitalsunlight.org.
Kim Alexander, Executive Director, California Voter Foundation
cvf@netcom.com
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