Public Policy
  Analysis, opinion & ideas from Steve Harry

Directory

About/Contact

Online campaign finance reporting

September 15, 2017 - See responses from Lansing city clerk Chris Swope and state representative Andy Schor at end.

Can you believe that campaign finance reports for local government offices in Michigan are done on paper? A candidate can download a program from the Secretary of State's website to prepare a report, but you cannot submit a digital report to the county clerk. You can email a PDF file, but this is essentially an image of the paper report. This primitive way of reporting has many drawbacks:

1. It's difficult for the candidate. There is MERTS, the program provided by the Secretary of State, but it has to be downloaded and installed on your computer, and unless it has improved a lot since I used it in 2011, it is not easy to use. Some candidates, like Lansing councilwoman Jessica Yorko, don't bother and just prepare the report by hand. Errors on hand-written or typed reports are difficult to correct.

2. It's time-consuming - and therefore costly - for the county clerk. Each paper report has to be scanned and then posted to the clerk's website. Reports have to be reviewed for errors, and when found, a letter is sent to the candidate (example). Letters are also sent to inform candidates when reports are due (example) and to threaten them when they are overdue (example).

3. It is difficult for the public to find and examine reports. For example, here's a portion of the list on the Ingham County clerk's website of Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero's reports:

The list contains not just reports, but all correspondence between the campaign committee and the county clerk. It is difficult to find a report for a specific reporting period. Once you find a report, there is no easy way to pull information from it. You have to re-key it. I've compiled contributions and expenditures from Mayor Bernero's reports for the last 8 years, typing the information into an Excel file. Then I sort into various sequences and copy it into this website. Click a year to see:

Year	Ending Balance
2010	$7,305.08
2011	$8,434.67
2012	$28,692.22
2013	$41,652.18
2014	$45,201.06
2015	$65,555.33
2016	$141,602.55
2017	$108,931.83	as of July 20

For state level offices, campaign finance reports must be filed electronically. They can be prepared with the MERTS program or with private software that creates files to Secretary of State specifications. On the Secretary of State's website, you can look up a candidate's campaign finance committee and then look at either the contributions or expenditures for that committee. You can specify time periods, contributor names, amounts, etc. And you can sort your results in various sequences. This is the screen used to request contribution information:

You can view the records you've requested online:

Or you can download a digital file that can be loaded into a spreadsheet program. That's how I got the information on contributions to Andy Schor's state representative campaign for this story.

Michigan Online Campaign Finance Reporting System

It should be possible to design a web-based program that allows candidate committees for state-level offices as well as local offices to enter information on contributions as they are received and expenses as they are incurred. It would be one-step recording and reporting. There would be no need to download a program or purchase software; the committee would just log on to what I will call the Michigan Online Campaign Finance Reporting System, or MOCFRS. Each transaction would be edited for errors such as exceeding contribution limits or failing to provide occupation and employer information for contributions over $100. Besides entering contributions and expenditures, the committee would be required to enter a transaction to finalize a report at close of books, before the reporting deadline. The system would notify the candidate if a report is not finalized by the deadline.

This would save counties a lot of money by relieving county clerks of the burden of processing and posting reports. If properly designed, it would make reporting easier for candidate committees. And since contributions and expenditures are recorded online, that information would be immediately available to the public. We could even require that contributions and expenditures be recorded within a week or two of being received/incurred.

Send comments, questions, and tips to stevenrharry@gmail.com, or call or text me at 517-505-2696. If you'd like to be notified by email when I post a new story, let me know.

Previous stories

September 16 response from Lansing city clerk Chris Swope:

I supported the addition of Section 18a to the MI Campaign Finance Act (below) which was adopted in 2013. At the time it was hoped that the Secretary of State would make a system available to counties, which has not happened. The Secretary of State's program for state level candidates is not even made available to local candidates to use for paper reporting, so it is difficult for many local candidates to keep track of cumulative totals. I agree it should be relatively easy to make the existing software work for electronic reporting to counties.