In the Political Muscle blog, the Los Angeles Times‘ Robert Salladay highlights a new (and evolving) campaign finance database and website, MAPlight.org, which has been assembled by TakeBackCA.org. The group describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating Californians about the impact of special interests and tested, proven alternatives to special-interest influence.” So far, the MAPlight site is limited to the 2003-2004 legislative session, with plans to exapnd the coverage.

The documentation for the database says that it will detail (1) how each state legislator voted on each of the 5,000 bills in the 2003-2004 California legislative session; (2) all campaign contributions made to each legislator from 2001-2004, categorized by the interest or industry of the contributor; (3) supporters and opponents of each bill, and the industries and interests those supporters and opponents represent; (4) a description of each bill; (5) and the full text of each bill, including committee reports and amendments.

On a related note, Salladay complains that in order to do campaign finance research,

[p]olitical reporters have to create their own databases, download what is available through the Secretary of State’s website, then manually enter any cross-matching information. It’s a time-consuming process to find out how much money a lawmaker has received from a certain industry, and match those contributions to a lawmaker’s votes in the Legislature. Multiply that by 120 lawmakers, and it’s a nightmare.

It’s true that researching campaign finance data has never been easy, and there’s no excuse for it not being easier — other than the fact that there are multiple special interests with a significant investment in it not getting any easier. This pattern dovetails with the pernicious trend toward the concealment of government information that is legally supposed to be freely and publicly available, along with the watering-down of open-government laws like the Freedom of Information Act, the Brown Act, and the California Public Records Act.

For concise and clear lists of who has contributed to the 13 qualified ballot measures this campaign and in what amounts, visit out Hot Topics pages for each proposition.

Trackback this post