An ethics-reform backfire
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- November
- 29
  No one at the Board of Elections saw it coming, but commissioners learned today that the requirement for prospective voting-machine vendors to disclose political contributions conflicts with a new state ethics law. The law trumps agency regulations. Board members said they would work with the Legislature on an amendment to the legislation.
The new ethics-reform legislation prohibits statewide elected officials, state officers and employees involved in awarding state contracts from asking current or prospective vendors about their political affiliation, campaign contributions and votes in elections.
The purpose of the Board of Elections’ requirement for disclosure on political donations was to let the public know who the vendors potentially were trying to influence. The department required two years’ worth of campaign-finance data.
Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner said lawmakers were attempting to correct “an abuse where government contracts were being given out to campaign contributors.
“And so it’s a good thing to reform that process. But they didn’t realize that with the broad language that they also in effect overrode what was a very good provision in the state board regulatinos that required that all voting-system equipment vendors make disclosures of their political contributions,” he said.
Political contributions from the vendors are on the agency’s Web site if they’re made in New York, but the companies have a national base, and the regulation required information on campaign donations in ever state.
“We just want to make sure that we cut out the bad and let the good in,” Commissioner Neil Kelleher said.
Barbara Bartoletti of the League of Women Voters said the elections regulation was in place for a good reason and the Legislature should allow it back in.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 6:50 pm by Cara Matthews.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
you’d think they could just look into their own campaign finance database to find out those answers. oh, wait it’s so error prone that even they don’t trust it. you know with the lack of enforcement and poorly interpretations of the statute which leads to loopholes the size of city block. ahem….limited liability companies…ahem.