The legislature's bad move on campaign donations

Justice Brandeis famously said that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So it is with campaign donations and the public's ability to scrutinize them.

If people know who and what is funding their lawmakers, it makes it that much easier to guard against criminal behavior and garden-variety conflicts of interest. The public has an interest in public officials knowing that this information is publicly available.

That's why the General Assembly made a bad move by reducing the number of Rhode Island politicians who need to file fundraising and campaign spending reports.

Had the bill been law during the 2006 election year, the number of candidates and office holders required to list their donors online would have dropped by close to a third, according to an analysis performed yesterday by the Board of Elections.

With Capitol TV cameras rolling during Tuesday night’s veto-override session at the State House, Rep. Thomas Slater, D-Providence, told colleagues he introduced the bill because: “there are a lot of elderly candidates who run for office … [who] still do not understand the logic of the computer.” For people like this, he argued, paper filings should again be an option.

But House Minority Whip Nicholas Gorham, R-Coventry, said: “I don’t really think the issue is about protecting the elderly here.”

“There are people in this room that just don’t want the data in that kind of format with the Board of Elections, where the public will be able to more easily access it …because our history has been to oppose such things; the history of the party in control has been to oppose public information on campaign finance,” he said. “That’s too bad.”

Nick Gorham is right. The potential inconvenience for public officials (and this seems overstated) is more than offset by the benefits of an open and accessible system for examining campaign donations.

Legislative officials should appreciate this, particularly in light of how Operation Dollar Bill has cast a shadow on the General Assembly.