August 26, 1999

Following the Money, Through the Web

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Who's Giving to Whom? Once Elusive, Political Donations Are Now Easy to Track

By LESLIE WAYNE

ith the 2000 Presidential race cranking up especially early, the denizens of that fabled ZIP code, 90210, are beginning to do what they do best in every election cycle: dust off their checkbooks and let their money fly.

If money is the mother's milk of politics, then 90210 is one of the biggest cash cows around. That Beverly Hills ZIP code gave more to Federal candidates last year than any other in California, by a long shot, and more than most other ZIP codes in the country. This year, the rich and famous are starting early: Candice Bergen has given the Gore campaign $1,000, Rob Reiner kicked in $2,000, Jack Nicholson gave $250 and Hugh Hefner $1,000.

	Ellen Weinstein

Barbra Streisand, one of 90210's biggest givers in 1998, with more than $38,000 in donations, has also given Al Gore $1,000 this year, though she has since switched her address to Santa Monica (90401). Warren Beatty, a 90210 resident who says some people are urging him to run for President himself, has given nothing to anyone -- perhaps deciding to save his money for his own bid.

Where does this information come from? The Web, of course, where technology is shedding new light on political contributions. Once hidden in dusty archives and often kept in hard-to-find spots that politicians did not make any easier to locate, campaign finance records on the state and national levels are now available on a growing number of user-friendly Web sites.

And, of course, it is not just the rich and famous whose donations can be tracked but everyone's -- even yours and your next-door neighbor's. All campaign donations are considered public information, and the records are readily available for public view.

This technological development is adding a new dimension to political discourse. Where political races once focused primarily on personalities, partisanship and issues, an awareness of -- and concern over -- the role of money in politics has grown. In large part, technology is driving and accelerating the debate by providing more and more information.

Hardly anyone knew who gave money to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Dwight D. Eisenhower or Harry S. Truman. But that ignorance -- which was sometimes the result of political calculation -- has been replaced by a new transparency.

The Internet is making it easy for journalists, competing candidates and ordinary citizens to connect the dots between politicians and their sources of money. And that has come about despite efforts by many in Congress to keep the activities of the Federal Election Commission, the Government agency that collects much of this data, to a bare minimum.

"Now people can sit at their terminal and pull up all this information," said Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington policy research group. "For the Presidential race, you don't have to leave your work station, and this means the barriers to getting this information have been substantially removed. This is an extraordinary development. Anyone, anywhere in America, can click onto one of these Web sites and see who is behind their lawmaker. And they couldn't five years ago."

Campaign information is easier than ever to get, but there is still secrecy.

"I don't want to sound pie-in-the-sky," continued Lewis, whose group has state-level campaign finance information on its Web site, www.publicintegrity.org. "But this brings democracy and accountability much closer to the average citizen. Frankly, it's wonderful."

To some, however, it is not so wonderful. As the availability of financial records has grown, so have attempts to evade disclosure. In the last few years, independent advocacy groups have cropped up to to sponsor televised political attack ads that are not connected with any candidate or party. These groups enjoy a legal loophole that allows them to stay out of Government records and spread their money in secrecy.

"One of the unintended effects of this new visibility is a growth in some of these subterranean activities," said Kenneth Gross, a Washington lawyer who specializes in election law.

Right now, there are around a half-dozen campaign finance Web sites, each offering slightly different information or different ways to connect candidates and dollars.

Some sites focus on the relationship between campaign donations and votes on Capitol Hill. Others provide information on every shred of campaign finance data filed with the Government, including exact copies of the often-obscure filings. Still others focus on candidates at the state level, going into minute detail on the sources of money for state legislative office-seekers.

Ground zero for all this information is the Federal Election Commission. Each Federal candidate and party must provide filings with the commission on how much money is raised, who donated it and how the money is spent.

For decades, the information was stored on paper in one spot in Washington or on computers that required a trip to the commission's offices to use. But in the 1996 elections, the commission began putting much of the information online, though the site was not easy to use then.

Campaign finance rules adopted after Watergate limit individual contributions to $25,000 a year. They permit individuals to give no more than $20,000 to a national party, $5,000 to a political action committee and $2,000 to a candidate -- up to $1,000 for the primary and $1,000 for the general election. Corporations and unions are prohibited from donating to Federal candidates.

Those restricted contributions are often called hard money.

	Shana Raab for The New York Times
	Tony Raymond and Kent Cooper, of Public Disclosure, in front of the Capitol.

By contrast, soft money is the name often given to what individuals, unions and corporations can give in unlimited amounts to national party committees for "party-building" activities.

These are the big-money donations. While ostensibly earmarked for generic activities like voter-education programs, soft money has become a way for big donations to go almost directly to candidates -- an abuse that has led those concerned about campaign financing to call for a ban on this type of contribution.

Whether hard or soft, all donations must be reported to the elections commission. Since it first listed donations online in 1996, the commission has vastly improved its Web site.

At www.fec.gov, everything anyone could possibly want to know about Federal election rules and donations is available. And, borrowing some of the user-friendly techniques of campaign finance Web sites run by public policy groups, the commission has made its site much easier to navigate. It is now easy for anyone to punch in a person's name under the View Contributions category on the home page (try William Gates, for instance) and see their donations.

The site lets a person view the actual documents filed by the candidates (for instance, the page listing Gates's $3,000 donation to the Republican Majority Fund, a political action committee, in which Gates describes his occupation as "CEO"). And, unlike on other Web sites, all spending data and every document filed by candidates and political committees with the Government can be seen, regardless of how obscure they are.

Related Article FEC Allows Matching Funds for Online Donations (June 10, 1999)

"We always thought of ourselves as being responsible for providing the basic raw material at this Web site," said Robert Biersack, the commission's Webmaster. "We also want to provide a very close, visible connection to the original source document. The connection between computer data and the original document is very important to us."

"What's also new is the way our data interrelates," Biersack added. "You can go to a candidate's filings and then find out who else is giving to that candidate or committee in a stream-of-consciousness way. We want to have enough flexibility so everyone's stream-of-consciousness can be accommodated."

The granddaddy of all independent campaign finance Web sites, and perhaps the most comprehensive, is www.tray.com, which was set up in 1996 by two former Federal Election Commission employees who formed a Washington research firm called Public Disclosure Inc.

Their site takes often-fragmented commission data and organizes the information into an accessible, logical and simple-to-use format. Whether it's following individual donations, looking at the Clinton legal defense fund, tracking the 2000 Federal candidates or exploring soft money donations, the site is a one-stop shopping center for campaign finance data.

For instance, in the section about the 2000 Presidential race, a search for information about Dan Quayle shows not only donations, but also transfers to his campaign from party committees as well as all his disbursements and the locations of all his contributors. The contributor list can also be sorted by employer and occupation.

The page on Senator Phil Gramm, for instance, shows donations dating to 1980 and links to all political action committees that have given to Gramm, the Texas Republican. It also includes money he has given to other candidates and his personal financial statement. The site has links to the actual documents filed with the F.E.C.

"We're interested in putting this information out without any spin," said Tony Raymond, who founded the site with a former commission official, Kent Cooper, "because we feel the dollars speak for themselves."

Raymond said the site was averaging around 7,000 to 12,000 visits a day early this summer, a number that he said would "go through the roof" when the 2000 election got into full swing later this year.

At the Web site for the Center for Responsive Politics (www.opensecrets.org), the emphasis is on the correlation between campaign contributions and votes in Congress. To that end, the site places great emphasis not only on campaign contributions, but also on lobbying data filed with the Senate and House.

SITE-SEEING Here are some Web sites that offer information on state campaign financing: NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON MONEY IN STATE POLITICS: www.sosaz.com/cfs/CampaignFinance.htm CONNECTICUT: election.dos.state.fl.us/campfin/cfindb.htm ILLINOIS: www.state.in.us/seb/html/campaignindex.html KANSAS: www.ethics.state.la.us MICHIGAN: www.elections.state.ny.us/finance/finance.htm NORTH CAROLINA: www2.state.oh.us/sos/search.html PENNSYLVANIA: governor.state.ut.us/ltgover/ctcintro.htm VIRGINIA: web.pdc.wa.gov

The site has easy-to-read reports on different industry groups and which candidates got their contributions. And its candidate profiles are comprehensive, showing raw data for who gave money as well as data for industry groups, presented with colorful graphs and charts.

The site shows, for instance, that George W. Bush, the Republican Presidential hopeful, is getting more money from every sector of the economy -- except labor unions and lawyers -- than any other candidate, including Vice President Al Gore. While Bush has received more than $1 million from the oil and gas industry, Gore has received $56,700; while the health care industry has given Bush more than $1 million, Gore has received $340,000.

"We are building a sandbox for people to play in," said Larry Makinson, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "We want people to grasp things easily. That's why we use lots of charts. We want people to see what they got from their candidates from all this money spent. After any vote in Congress, we want people to know whether money bought something or failed to buy something."

Has all this disclosure and potential public scrutiny made some donors squeamish? The answer is: sort of.

And one side of politics that often does not show up on campaign finance sites involves issue advocacy groups.

In the last Presidential election, such groups poured millions of dollars into television advertisements attacking candidates or praising them -- but without expressly advocating a candidate's election or defeat. Because the groups operate independently of the candidates and their ads do not contain the words 'vote for" or "vote against," the law does not require that they register with the F.E.C. or list their donors.

"I suspect that all this Internet data is leading to some of the current pressure to move donations off the radar screen," said Trevor Potter, a Washington lawyer and former Federal Election Commissioner. "All these campaign finance activities are becoming heavily publicized and readily disclosed. A lot of people who didn't want their activities disclosed in the first place are more threatened and trying more vigorously to avoid that spotlight."

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• The Center for Public Integrity

• Federal Election Commission

• Public Disclosure, Inc.

• opensecrets.com