<p class="MsoNormal">Yesterday’s <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/17/AR2006091700402.html">K Street Confidential column</a> in the Washington Post by Jeffrey Birnbaum seems to have ignited a brushfire in the blogosphere. Birnbaum’s subject for the day was the fact that candidates for the U.S. Senate – unlike anyone else at the federal level – still file their campaign reports on paper rather than electronically. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">(This means weeks of delay in getting the information into a searchable format, and expending taxpayer funds to hand-input paper records from the campaigns into computer format. See my <a href="1186">post from yesterday</a>)</p> <p class="MsoNormal">If anyone was shocked – shocked, I tell you! – at the absurdity of all this in this computer age, it was the people whose fingers are tapping out URLs on keyboards all day long. By 10:30 am, the <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/18/133055/656">Daily Kos had issued an action alert</a> on the subject, listing the names and phone numbers of Democratic senators to call urging them to support electronic filing. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Shortly afterwards, the lefties were joined by the righties as <a href="http://www.redstate.com/stories/special_features/fec/bring_the_senate_into_the_21st_century">Red State jumped on the bandwagon</a>, urging their readers to contact Republican Senator Trent Lott, whose Rules and Administration Committee is holding up any change in the rules.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">Birnbaum’s piece was picked up by <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/17/AR2006091700402_Technorati.html">many other blogs</a> yesterday, though most simply linked straight through to the column.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">As it turns out, some of the people most surprised – and delighted – to hear of the growing pressure for the Senate to file electronically were the staffers at the <a href="http://www.fec.gov/">Federal Election Commission</a>. The commission has been trying for years to get the Senate to live by the same rules that everyone else has followed since 1995 – but practically no one outside the agency had been paying attention.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">If the Senate filed electronically, the FEC would save something over $100,000 per election cycle that they’ve been paying to have human inputters re-enter the paper records into computer format. That’s got to be one of the dumbest expenditures of taxpayer funds anywhere, and the FEC – among others – would dearly love to zero it out.</p>
