Checking a candidate’s contributors has become critical for understanding the candidate’s politics. It’s also easier than ever before with regular deadlines and electronic records — unless the legislator you are tracking is a member of the U.S. Senate.
For more than a decade now, the Senate has kept itself exempt from rules other federal candidates must follow.
Old-School Disclosure
Say you decided to run for office. Of course, you’d have to keep track of the money your campaign takes in and the money it spends.
The government keeps pretty close tabs on those numbers at the Federal Election Commission. So, somebody in your campaign office would carefully enter that data into a spreadsheet, updating it daily with new information.
Now, if you were running for president or a seat in the House of Representatives, every few months you’d have to report all those numbers to the FEC.
So, you’d pull it up on the computer and zap it over.
But if you were running for the U.S. Senate, the process is … well … one that the former engineer and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg himself could not have made up.
SOURCE: In Digital Finance Race, Senate Uses Horse And Buggy : NPR.