Senate Republican candidates have rebounded from their disadvantage in fundraising, Nate Silver reports in a typically evenhanded manner at his website FiveThirtyEight. In some important cases — notably Iowa — GOP candidates have raised much more in July, August and September than their Democratic opponents. But one of Silver’s paragraphs caught my eye.
“The Federal Election Commission’s deadline to report third-quarter fundraising totals passed on Wednesday, covering money raised from July 1 through Sept. 30. Comprehensive fundraising totals are not yet available on the FEC’s website, but I was able to find data on most Senate races through local media accounts.”
Huh? There have been numerous articles about the partisan deadlocks at the Federal Election Commission, which under law has three Democratic and three Republican members. But one central — and nonpartisan — function of the agency is to provide the public with accurate information about campaigns’ reported fundraising and spending.
And yet here is Silver, a highly talented professional posting late Thursday afternoon, and the FEC has not yet posted candidates’ filings on its website. Silver is reduced to looking for local media accounts; his other alternative, I suppose, would have been to trot over to the FEC’s offices and copy down the numbers by hand. Quite a trot for him, since he’s based in New York and the FEC is headquartered in Washington.
So let me get this straight. In the Internet age, when all sorts of information is being made available instantly, the FEC is incapable of posting very important data on its website within 24 hours of a well-known deadline. Incompetence? Sloth? What gives?
