Vitali improves campaign finance home page;
criticizes Ridge site
Vitali pointed to the site he created on his own as an example of what can be done. His Web site, which can be accessed at www.pacampaigns.com, tracks campaign finance information on 511 current and former Pennsylvania state lawmakers, statewide officeholders and candidates. It includes a feature that allows users to select a name and search all records for contributions made to that person since 1998.
"We took all this information directly from the state's home page," Vitali said. "We went through this effort because the Ridge administration refuses to provide a search feature on its home page.
"It's incredible to me that they would go to the trouble of compiling hundreds of records, most of which are entered by hand, but not provide search capability.
"It's like building an expensive car and not giving us the keys to drive it," he said.
Vitali's database also contains finance reports for approximately 560 political action committees, which made contributions in the 1998 and 2000 election cycles totaling millions of dollars.
For example, a search of the records for LAWPAC, the political action committee of the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, shows 70 contributions made so far this year to candidates for the General Assembly by the group.
The site includes more than 70,000 records of donations, and it allows users to click on names to call up all the information on that donor.
Pennsylvania's official Internet site for campaign finance information (www.dos.state.pa.us) contains no such search feature.
"My own Pennsylvania Campaign Finance Home Page, which was assembled with limited resources, shows that a campaign finance search feature is entirely doable. There's no technical reason it can't be done," Vitali said. "One can only conclude that the Ridge administration does not want the public to be able to follow the money trail in Harrisburg.
"I'd rather not be in the campaign finance home page business, but I will continue to update and improve my site until the Ridge administration puts up an adequate site of its own," Vitali said.
"With a few easy technical modifications, the administration could provide citizens with a much better tool for understanding the relationship between political gift-giving and government action in Pennsylvania."