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 \u2014 unless the legislator you are tracking is a member of the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n
For more than a decade now, the Senate has kept itself exempt from rules other federal candidates must follow.<\/p>\n
Old-School Disclosure<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So, you’d pull it up on the computer and zap it over.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n