Topeka ? In the final two days of the 2002 campaign for state attorney general, a Kansas abortion doctor spent more than $150,000 to try to defeat anti-abortion Republican Phill Kline.

But voters didn’t know about it until months after the election.

Under state law, campaign contributions in the final days before an election do not have to be reported until months later.

In 23 other states, voters would have known before the election who paid for the last-minute barrage of television and radio ads.

The lack of such last-minute reporting and other lax regulations on public disclosure of campaign finances have earned Kansas an “F” in a new national report card.

“Kansas has significant room to improve,” officials at the Campaign Disclosure Project concluded.

The project was funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and conducted by the California Voter Foundation, the Center for Governmental Studies and the UCLA School of Law.

The study measured all 50 states in four areas of campaign finance: disclosure laws, electronic filing of campaign finance reports, accessibility of campaign finance information and usability of state Web sites that contain campaign finance reports.

“We set a high bar, but not an unrealistic one,” said Rachel Zenner, project director. “We’re not here to beat up on the states, but give them ideas on how they could improve.”

The Campaign Disclosure Project is urging Kansas lawmakers in the Statehouse, shown reflected in a nearby building, to reform campaign finance disclosure laws.

The top-ranked states were Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, Hawaii, Florida, New Jersey, California and Michigan.

Seventeen states received “F” grades, including Kansas, which ranked 39th nationally.

Once leader, now laggard

Lynn Hellebust, a longtime observer of Kansas politics, said Friday the state was on the cutting edge of campaign finance reforms in the 1970s but had fallen behind.

“Standards have shifted and been more exacting,” said Hellebust, who was the first director of the Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission. He later was an open government advocate as state director of Common Cause and now is editor and publisher of the annual “Kansas Legislative Handbook.”

¢Grading State Disclosure – 2003 (Kansas)¢Kansas Governmental Ethics Commission

The failure of Kansas to enact more progressive campaign finance disclosure laws stems from legislative obstinacy, less political media coverage and the fact advocacy groups have pulled out of smaller states, he said.

“You have to have disclosure, you have to have dissemination,” Hellebust said. “In those terms, Kansas obviously falls short.” But he added that last-minute campaign reports would change the outcome of many races because most people simply aren’t that focused on the campaigns.

Burdett Loomis, a political science professor at Kansas University, said the late-campaign contributions from Dr. George Tiller in the attorney general’s race were exactly why a late-reporting requirement should be law.

Without quick, reliable and accessible information on campaign contributions, Loomis said, “It’s unfair to the opposing candidate and ultimately unfair to the public.”

He said, “I think that you have a couple of goals in campaign finance. Sometimes they are not mutually supportive. One of the clear goals is transparency. You want reporting systems that get you the information as quickly as possible. In the era of electronic filing, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. It should be accessible to journalists, critics, opponents, so that eventually in a campaign everyone would have the possibility of knowing who was funding each candidate.”

Online problems

The new report also criticized the state Ethics Commission’s Web site.

“Considering that the Governmental Ethics Commission staff goes to the trouble of data-entering information from the receipts schedules filed by candidates, there could be a better search interface and better access to the itemized data online,” the report stated.

But Carol Williams, the current executive director of the Ethics Commission, said she had received no criticisms from the public.

“If we were to hear from people that they were having a hard time, we would immediately fix it,” she said.

The Ethics Commission Web site received 355,559 visits in the last fiscal year, which was 100,000 more than the year before, Williams said.

The report said one of the problems is that the information on the Web site cannot be downloaded to be used in offline analyses. But Williams said she didn’t understand what the problem was because the information is available on the Web site.

But Zenner said the project’s experts reviewed the Web site and found it below average. She said nearly all the states had problems in this area.