Follow the Money, online, if you can.by Sarah Phelan
“Follow the money." That's what Deep Throat told reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, William Goldman’s classic film about the investigation that led to President Nixon's resignation.
It was good advice then and now, no matter what story you are investigating, no matter what city you live/work in.
But Deep Throat’s classic advice got a tad harder to follow in the city by the Bay, thanks to kinks in new software, plus the overzealous efforts of some interns who apparently got carried away with the black pen, while redacting campaign finance records down at the San Francisco Ethics Commission.
The SF Ethics Commission, just in case you are wondering, is where people running for elected office, and people running political campaigns, file their financial disclosure reports.
All of which makes Ethics a good place to start if you want to follow the money in a particular political race.
It’s a pathway that you need to keep watching for months, if not years, after a race, since many donations and expenditures are made at the last minute and aren’t recorded, until long after the victory champagne has gone flat.
These days, campaign filings can be made the old-fashioned way, with paper filings, or the new Internet-enabled way, with online filings.
If you file electronically, Ethics’ software automatically redacts the street addresses and signatures of campaign donors from these online records.
These redactions aren’t undertaken because of new redaction policies over at City Hall, Ethics officials say, but to put the department in compliance with the Secretary of State.
But when Ethics started contracting with private vendor Netfile this spring, Netfile’s software apparently began deleting donor’s zip codes, too.
As a result of these unsanctioned redactions, it became impossible to follow online, exactly which parts of the City, the money was flowing from, in the June 3 election.
Meanwhile, the address of the Ethics Commission itself got redacted from a couple of online reports. (You can view an example of this redaction classic, by clicking here:
“For them to redact the actual address of the Ethics Commission speaks volumes about the mood over there,” one City Hall insider told us.
But the way Ethics’ executive director John St. Croix explains it, this classic blooper occurred because Ethics was trying to expand the amount of information that available online.
“Some overzealous interns got carried away,” St. Croix said, as they tried to help Ethics redact donor street addresses from paper filings, before posting them online.
“This happened because we were trying to scan copies of paper filings and post them online, which has never been done before, “ St. Croix explained.
“We decided it wasn’t worth the effort to redo it, all over again, St. Croix added, noting that you can still view the original, non-redacted paper filings at the Ethics Office.
Provided, that is, that you have Ethics street address, which is at 25 Van Ness Avenue. But shh, don’t tell anyone!
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Comments (2)
There are a lot of candidates running for office this year who have had a role in approving contracts and granting various entitlements, exceptions and variances over the past few years.
Has anyone investigated the intersection of the sets of contract recipient and campaign contributor for current and recent public servants with a role in granting entitlements?
-marc
Posted by marc | August 21, 2008 10:10 PM
Ethics and John St Croix have gotten the SF Redaction Cancer - the exemption allowing redaction before online posting is limited to currently Elected and Appointed officials only.
We are talking about information commonly available in commercial mailing lists and the phone book/online search .
Imagine if the Elections department refused to post contact information of non-incumbents running for office - people who choose to be public? Or you were prohibited from accessing home sales records of the Assessor-Recorder - it has a street address. Or the large majority of court records online.
How would one easily confirm the number of homes John McCain has?
Posted by Kimo Crossman | August 22, 2008 02:28 PM