We’re No. 50! We’re No. 50!

That’s the bad news.

Basically, the study looked into disclosure-filing requirements for the 225 political parties in all 50 states. The Center for Public Integrity is a national group that analyzes elections and politicians, government accountability and ethics-related issues. The methodology of the study was fairly simple. The CPI created a ranking system that assigned a score based on the answers to survey questions regarding campaign-finance disclosures for political parties.

There were five key areas of disclosure: reporting of contributions; reporting of expenditures; filing requirements; public access to the documents; and enforcement.

“The transfers of unregulated soft money from federal party committees to their state counterparts confirm a commonly held perception that state parties are used to launder soft money and influence presidential and congressional elections in a way never envisioned nor intended by federal election law,” wrote the authors, John Dunbar, MaryJo Sylwester and Robert Moore, in the main findings section of the study.

The good news is that this year’s Campaign Finance Reform Act bans soft-money contributions at the federal level. That means that, since members of Congress will still be able to raise soft money for state parties, the soft-money activity will simply move off Capitol Hill to the states. With no limits on contributions to political parties in Nevada, we can expect to see a lot of corrupt cash coming into the state. OK—for the irony impaired—it’s really more bad news. The federal campaign-finance reform will have been derailed.

More information on the study and about Nevada specifics can be found at www.statesecrets.org.

brianb@newsreview.com