Alabama: a "glorified stenography service"
Mooncat writes on Left in Alabama (and quotes the Montgomery Advertiser): Alabama's campaign finance laws are set up to hide the money trail. There are few limitations on contributions and those contributions are often laundered by unlimited money transfers from one PAC to another so you can't tell who is giving what to whom. I knew all that and was properly outraged, but I didn't realize SoS Beth Chapman's office is just a glorified stenography service for campaigns and PACs with no ability or responsibility to check the accracy of reports.
An Alabama agency that oversees political action committees failed to see a $460,000 reporting error in a PAC formed for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. ...-- PAC Money in Alabama - Stop the Dirty Dough!The Secretary of State's office only posts the information online and doesn't review them for errors, said Robert Johnston, an attorney for the agency.
"The secretary of state does not audit these," he said. "We don't have any enforcement authority on that. We just make it available to the public."