Tracking the flow of money in Hawai'i politics — who gives it and who gets it — is a difficult and time-consuming process.

Many records are still filed on paper rather than electronically with the state Campaign Spending Commission.

Even the financial records of the political parties, with their multimillion-dollar war chests, and those of all large corporate and union donors are filed on paper, making identification of the big financial players in Hawai'i politics a hard slog for regulators and voters alike.

Commission officials say that is likely to change this summer when many more of the paper records will be filed electronically and posted on the Internet.

For now, the lack of information on political money in Hawai'i serves to erode an important check and balance in the democratic process. If voters can't evaluate the influence of campaign money on elected officials, they can't fully judge if candidates are serving in the public's best interest.

"It's a basic dollars-and-cents issue for the voters," said Edwin Bender, executive director of the nonpartisan Institute on Money in State Politics. "Who are the candidates accountable to?"

The institute is a nonprofit, national organization that monitors the traffic of political dollars in every state of the union, but it says it has run into problems gathering data from Hawai'i.

In the Institute's 2002 analysis of election financing, Hawai'i was excluded "because the Institute was unable to obtain data for all candidates." Louisiana and Mississippi also were not covered, but only because they did not hold regular legislative elections in the period covered, the Institute reported.

Specifically, Bender said his organization has had a difficult time getting copies of paper records from the Campaign Spending Commission.

"We have not had a good working relationship with (commission executive director) Bob Watada," Bender said by telephone from his office in Helena, Mont. "His argument has been that he runs a small office and he hasn't had time to do it."

Watada said he has been busy with other priorities, among them spearheading a wide-ranging investigation of illegal campaign donations that has resulted in $1.3 million in fines against 87 different corporate and individual campaign donors.

The commission has made some progress in record-keeping recently. Watada said all candidate reports now submitted to his office are being electronically scanned and posted for public viewing on the commission's Web site at state.hi.us/campaign.

The scanned images, however, are in a "pdf" format, which is like a photograph of paperwork that can't be quickly searched or sorted, as electronically filed reports can be.

Bender said the scanned images of Hawai'i candidate reports also are being sent to his organization for conversion into searchable electronic databases. About 60 percent of all records are now available at the Institute's followthemoney.org Web site and more are being added regularly.

So far the state commission and Bender's organization have concentrated on campaign finance reports submitted by political candidates and not by donors — just the "who gets" part of the political financing equation rather than the "who gives."

Watada said he hopes to begin receiving electronic reports later this year from noncandidate committees, the corporations and political action committees that give at least $1,000 in total during one election cycle to a political candidate or party.

Once the electronic versions of these reports are available, citizens should have an easier time learning more about the flow of money in and out of political campaigns.

Wisneski, the field coordinator for Hawai'i Clean Elections, said all who file campaign spending reports should be required to file electronically, be they candidates or political action committees.

She said having the campaign reports online is important, especially for people on the Neighbor Islands or those with limited mobility who would otherwise not have access to them.

Wisneski said filers frequently submit incorrect or incomplete hard copy reports and some records are handwritten and occasionally illegible.

The group's volunteers helped to scan the reports and discovered several inaccurate or incomplete filings and brought them to the attention of the commission, Wisneski said.

"I respect that (the commission staffers) are very busy but I think it's important for them to check over each and every filing."

Reach Jim Dooley at 535-2447 or jdooley@honoluluadvertiser.com. Reach Gordon Pang at 525-8070 or gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.