
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, October 15, 1993                   TAG: 9403180009
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CAMPAIGN FUNDS

THE 1993 GENERAL Assembly may have intended to do political candidates a favor (and, of course, General Assembly members are political candidates every two or four years) when it passed legislation reducing the number of required campaign-finance disclosures.

But the handlers of both Democratic and Republican candidates say the new rule has handicapped them by creating a three-month blackout of information on the money chase in opposition camps.

More important, the data gap keeps Virginians less informed - during a significant portion of election campaigns - about who's getting how much money and from whom.

Previously, candidates had to report expenditures and contributions on July 15, Aug. 15 and Oct. 1. The new law creates a gap between disclosures on July 15 and Oct. 15, which, the plaint goes, is so big the opposition can drive a financial steamroller through it.

During this critical fund-raising period, candidates don't know if, where and how their opponents may be amassing huge war chests to fund media blitzes, mailings and phone-bank operations in the final three weeks before the election. Lacking the intelligence-gathering weapon of the mid-campaign financial filing, candidates can be caught off guard.

Pity, pity, and who cares? Voters should.

The purpose of financial disclosure, after all, is not to aid candidates or to burden them with unnecessary paperwork. Neither, as some legislators seem to believe, is it a perk for the press. It's to inform the public as to the sources of candidates' funds, the better to understand if and to what extent those candidates may be obliged to moneyed special interests, rather than to the public interest.

Legislative leaders now say the schedule change was a goof. They'd set out to simplify the state's requirements and coordinate them more with federal law; they didn't realize in the process they were inadvertently weakening the disclosure law.

Oh no, they'd never want to weaken disclosure. In any case, and for whatever reason, weaken it they did - at a time, incidentally, when popular sentiment is for fuller campaign-finance disclosure.

Undoing the error should be on the General Assembly's '94 agenda - not for the politicians' sake, but for the public's.

Keywords:
POLITICS

by CNB