You’ve probably never heard of Arnold Queen. Yet in a year when a dozen U.S. Senate seats are up for grabs, voter knowledge about the money behind the candidates depends on this one civil servant.
Queen, 54, has been working for the Federal Election Commission in Washington, D.C., since he came of age, back in 1976. His job entails overseeing a vital if antiquated task. Despite calls by President Barack Obama to overhaul the federal campaign finance system, Queen’s job looks to be secure.
Here’s why: In its arrogance, the U.S. Senate refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Internet in a way that might give voters a glimpse into the power behind their throne.
No matter if they are running for city council or president, politicians for the past decade have regularly filed campaign finance disclosure reports online. Anyone who is interested can figure out which interest groups are spending money on the campaigns.
But being a U.S. senator or Senate candidate has its prerogatives. One is to ignore technology and make it as hard as possible to determine the money behind Senate candidates.
The issue arises whenever there are deadlines to file reports, as there was this past Sunday. It becomes more relevant when there is a hotly contested senate race, as there will be in California this year.
To comply with Senate rules, candidates merely must print paper copies of their disclosures – they can be thousands of pages – postmark the copies by the filing deadlines, and mail them to the Senate.
Then the process gets ridiculous.
Once reports arrive at the Senate, staffers use scanners to transform the pages back to digital images. Then the staffers e-mail the images to the FEC.
That’s where Arnold Queen comes in, and where the system becomes more absurd. He must print the copies that Senate staffers have scanned.
I first met and wrote about Queen three years ago. Back then, he was using a 10-year-old copy machine that turned out 500 pages an hour. He has a new machine now. It can spew 2,000 copies an hour.
Queen reported by phone that he had copied 10,000 pages Tuesday. As more reports arrive, he will get up to 16,000 pages.
“They’re printing right now as we speak,” Queen said. With his new machine, he can print pages “pretty much as fast as the post office can process” them.
It gets worse.
Once Queen makes the copies, the FEC delivers the reports to a company in Virginia. There, keypunchers input details about the donors – names, amounts and dates of the donations – back into computers.
Once the keypunchers finish, the FEC places the disclosures on its Web site in a searchable format.
The process can take weeks. In the recent Massachusetts race to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, the last report detailing who gave in the last weeks before the election was not posted in a searchable format until after the election.
There is an alternative. Senators can voluntarily file their reports on the FEC’s Web site, and make them available to anyone.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is defending her seat this year, is among the few senators who regularly files her reports voluntarily on this site, though she neglected to file one of her quarterly reports from 2009 until I asked about it earlier this week.
On the Republican side, Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chairwoman, e-mailed her 311-page report to journalists on Friday. Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, one of her Republican foes, did the same with his 446-page report. A third candidate, Tom Campbell, had not raised money into his Senate campaign committee in 2009.
Neither Fiorina nor DeVore’s reports were in a form that would permit the public to easily sort or search them. After initially telling me they were unaware of the voluntary filing system, DeVore and Fiorina discovered that indeed they could file electronically. Fiorina posted her report on the FEC Web site on Tuesday.
“Should Carly be elected,” a Fiorina campaign spokeswoman said, “she will push to change the Senate rules to not only require online filing for all senators, but also to require more timely disclosure of campaign finances. She believes the current system lacks transparency and is unnecessarily cumbersome.”
Promises, promises.
Politicians far more practiced than Fiorina have tried. Three years ago, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., vowed to work to bring about the requirement. Three years later, nothing has changed.
It’s not clear which senators stand in the way of this seemingly minor change. But Senate leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are among those who refuse to voluntarily file their reports online.
The FEC regularly asks Congress to require senators to file reports electronically. The FEC estimated last year “at least $250,000 per year in costs directly attributable to current Senate filing procedures would be saved by requiring electronic filing.”
The commission has even invoked potential of disruption due to terrorism, noting that with electronic filing there would be no risk of anthrax attacks.
In the world’s most exclusive club, such words have no effect.