Editorial: Let voters follow the paper trail

Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2002 | 9:08 a.m.

It's Election Day. Do you know where your candidates' financial disclosure statements are? If you're answering no, don't feel alone. Some statements are in the mail. Some haven't even been filed yet. Some are at the Clark County Election Department. Some are in Carson City. Few of the statements for the current filing period are online. And should you be fortunate enough to obtain a current statement, would it answer all your questions, such as: What is the campaign's fund balance? How much has the candidate raised in total? Are the candidate's finances in the red or black?

Unfortunately, to answer those basic questions, a voter would need statements from all past campaign-finance reporting periods. No single statement, except for the first one filed by a first-time candidate, contains a campaign's whole financial picture. Obtaining the back statements would require money to pay per-page copying fees -- a contributions and expenses report can be dozens of pages at anywhere from 25 cents to $1 a page. This could be a significant expense if the voter wanted to check on several candidates. Finding those answers would also require a calculator and a lot of time, and possibly a trip to Carson City. And once you went to this trouble, could you then feel confident of learning accurate information? Don't count on it. For many of the candidates, the forms are too complicated and they fill them out wrong.

Secretary of State Dean Heller, who is in charge of Nevada elections, should create a task force that would include critics -- there's no shortage of them -- of the campaign financial forms now in use. The forms have been roundly panned for at least the last decade and are still flawed, despite some efforts to improve them. This task force, for once and for all, should come up with forms that are easy to understand, easy to access, and that quickly and conveniently provide all of the information to which voters are entitled.