Threatened with a veto by Gov. Bob Taft, the Ohio General Assembly backed off an attempt to gut the state's campaign finance reporting law. Members of the Senate, creatures who work "in the shadows of the evening," to quote an infuriated Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, are recoiling at the prospect of having to tell the public who their contributors are in any sort of timely fashion.

In 1999, a law was passed saying that candidates for statewide offices would have to file their campaign finance reports electronically by last year. The law said candidates for the General Assembly would have to file their 2003 reports electronically.

You might be wondering what the fuss is all about. After all, campaign finance reports - the records of who gave how much to whom and what the candidates spent it on - already are public records. All this information piles up in the Secretary of State's office or in the local boards of elections. Well, the fuss is that the legislators, at least a lot of them, don't want this mountain of data to become something that is actually useful to the voters.

Election reports are, to say the least, voluminous. Going through piles of paper to locate the name of a particular donor is a needle-in-the-haystack process. Filing deadlines mean that the information comes in all at once, making it impossible to sift through it quickly.

Electronic filing changes all of that. The reports can be viewed as soon as they are filed. Computers are marvelous machines for sorting out big piles of numbers and names into useful bits of information. It makes it a whole lot easier to track donations, and to speculate on what a donor might expect in return for his generosity. A person logging into the secretary of state's database might be able to quickly draw connections between legislative votes and campaign contributions.

As I said, the 1999 law required the statewide candidates - governor, auditor, treasurer, secretary of state, attorney general and Supreme Court justices - to file this way starting last year. But the legislators, shuddering at the prospect of such openness, decided to throw a bushel over this particular ray of light.

Tuesday night an amendment was slipped into an unrelated, innocuous election bill having to do with minor-party candidates that was being worked on in the House/Senate Conference Committee. The amendment not only eliminated the electronic filing requirement that was coming up for the legislators, it went back and eliminated it for the statewide offices as well. The bill slipped out of the conference committee and over to the Senate, where it passed without opposition late Wednesday afternoon.

According to the explanation of Sen. Jeff Jacobson, R-Dayton, chief proponent of the measure, the Senate wasn't really trying to hide anything from the public. The senators were just trying to help their campaign treasurers, many of who are computer illiterate.

Given that computer use is now taught at the nursery school level, I wonder where the senator is getting his campaign volunteers. If you stop by his office, ask where they keep the inkwells and quill pens.

The amended bill proposed that the paper filings be turned in to the secretary of state, who could then contract with a data-entry company to input the information into the state's computers. Mr. Blackwell noted that would be costly and time-consuming. It would also mean that pre-election reports would never be available to the voters until after Election Day.

"Information delayed is information denied," said Mr. Blackwell, who has been a vocal advocate for transparency in campaign finance. He ripped his fellow Republicans, saying the move showed the danger of "one-party rule." He called on the governor to veto the bill if the House passed it.

The governor, also a true believer on campaign finance transparency, didn't let it go that far. He announced Thursday morning he would issue a veto if the House dared follow the Senate back into the shadows. The House quickly rejected the conference committee report and sent it back for more work.

Ironically, most of the legislators already use electronic filing successfully. According to Mr. Blackwell's staff, 75 members of the General assembly filed their campaign finance reports electronically this year, even though they didn't have to. That leaves only about 15 senators and 20 representatives who are intimidated by the prospect of filling out a computer spreadsheet. Under the existing law, the first reports they have to file for 2003, won't actually be due until January 2004.

Mr. Blackwell is offering them a compromise. His staff is now offering free keyboarding lessons for Sen. Jacobson and the other technology-challenged members of the legislature.

Contact David Wells at 768-8310; fax: 768-8610; e-mail: dwells@enquirer.com.