12/06/02

Columbus- Open-government advocates, with the help of Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, yesterday killed an attempt to turn back campaign finance filing requirements.

The provision would make paper reports an option again for statewide and legislative candidates, political action committees and parties that had almost entirely converted to the electronic format.

Critics said it would destroy progress on quick, easy access to contribution data for voters and journalists.

"It's a rollback to a 20th century system that was slower, less accurate and would make us increasingly reliant on data-entry vendors," Blackwell said, adding that proposed new filing fees and earlier deadlines for paper filers wouldn't begin to address cost and time concerns. "In this case, access delayed is access denied."

Backers of the proposal said Blackwell's electronic filing is filled with bugs and needs more work before campaigns should be forced to use it.

"It has created a hardship for people . . . to the point where some of them have had real difficulty in meeting the requirement," said Sen. Mark Mallory, a Cincinnati Democrat. "These treasurers are candidates' wives, husbands, even kids sometimes. They're not CPAs."

The Senate's overwhelming approval of the little-noticed amendment on Wednesday set off a torrent of criticism. Its most vocal opponent was Blackwell, who called it "an 11th-hour maneuver in a lame-duck session in the shadows of the evening" and lobbied legislative leaders and the governor to reject the change. The House yesterday sent the measure back to a conference committee that will have to strike the provision to avoid a threatened veto by Gov. Bob Taft.

Blackwell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful in 2006, blamed Senate president hopeful Jeff Jacobson, a Dayton-area Republican, for championing the amendment. It was attached to a larger bill sponsored by Rep. Merle Kearns, a Springfield Republican.

"This was something that rubbed him [Jacobson] the wrong way two years ago and he didn't drop it," Blackwell said. "He saw an opportunity and seized upon it. Luckily for us, we were able to catch it and mobilize opposition to something that is just bad public policy."

Jacobson's opposition to filing campaign reports electronically is long-standing. In 1999, he led a last-minute effort to exclude legislators from the requirement but failed.

Yesterday, Jacobson accused Blackwell of "political posturing," charging that candidates trying to use the system encounter incompetence and technological nightmares.

"My goal is to reconsider whose responsibility it is to make this information available to the public," he said. "He [Blackwell] has tried to make it out as if it's about Should it be available to the public or not?' which is disingenuous, false, unfair and malicious. He knows that's not our situation at all."

Blackwell shot back that lawmakers are only trying to help themselves.

He called misleading "this notion that this is speaking out for the little guy."

"We're willing to look at how we make the system better, but we're not going to entertain for one moment a rollback of the system," he said.

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jsmyth@plaind.com, 1-800-228-8272