For nearly three decades, since California approved the Watergate- spawned Political Reform Act in 1974, political reformers have sought electronic filing of the cumbersome, detailed reports of spending and contributions. But until now, the political establishment has successfully fended off repeated attempts to require such filing, partly because the issue never has raised much interest outside of the small group of people who keep tabs on the Capitol and partly because most professional politicians, regardless of what they say for public consumption, have no real desire to make their political finances readily accessible.

But the combination of a lame-governor who wants to build a reform record for presidential run in the year 2000 -- a federal office, by the way, that already requires electronic filing -- and an apparently termed-out Legislature looking for a legacy had a meeting of minds. The result is SB49 by Sen. Betty Karnette, a Southern California Democrat, that requires candidates who raise or spend more than $100,000 in the 2000 primary election to file electronic reports; for the general election of that year, the threshold is $50,000. Republican Gov. Pete Wilson signed the bill over the weekend.

Candidates who wish to can voluntarily file electronically next year. Most campaigns already keep electronic records on computer disks, but use their equipment to generate printed documents that are submitted to the state. The Karnette bill, in effect, requires them to submit the information electronically to the secretary of state's office which, in turn, will post them on its official Web site. That means anyone with a computer and modem will be able to obtain access to the information without having to travel to an office and sift through thousands of pages of documents.

But the real value of electronic filing is not its convenience. Rather, it is the ease with which professional political watchdogs -- journalists and reformers, for example -- will be able to take the data and document in a myriad of ways the influence of money on political decision making. During the past five years, most major newsrooms have developed the ability to use computers to sift vast amounts of data. The technique is called CAR, for Computer Assisted Reporting, and it involves using high-speed electronic processors to quickly examine large amounts of information, or databases, in a quest for stories. The electronic data, for example, allows reporters to isolate campaign contributions by amount and source, then sort them by date and cross-reference them with floor and committee votes -- a process that is extraordinarily difficult to do now with paper records but which a computer makes far easier.

Moreover, electronic filing will allow any member of the public to see the campaign reports in the same, unfiltered format that journalists and reformers see. The public won't have to rely on someone else's interpretation of the data; they can see it all for themselves.

It's about time.

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