It's good to know who gave how much and to which candidate, even when an election is over. It's much better still when you can have that information before voters decide.

That's a luxury Oregon journalists enjoyed during the campaign to replace Sen. Bob Packwood.

With help from the Center for Responsive Politics, reporters at The Oregonian and Willamette Week, an alternative weekly, linked candidates with contributions from interest groups and industries. All of this was done before voters needed to turn in their special, mail-in ballots.

"This was the first attempt to do real-time reporting and get a handle on the money before elections," said Larry Makinson, deputy director of the center in Bandon, Ore. "I'm not aware that anyone has done that before in a federal race."

Working independently, Steve Suo of The Oregonian and Bob Young of Willamette Week convinced the candidates to disclose their contribution records ahead of the Federal Election Commission's deadline.

Identifying contributors

This allowed Makinson to do what he does best - identify individual contributors with interest groups or industries and determine where the money really is coming from.

"The only way is to browbeat the candidates into releasing the information," Makinson said. "They don't like to share information if they can get away with it."

The Oregonian and Willamette Week then analyzed the databases and did stories that identified one candidate, Rep. Ron Wyden, as the favorite of former Packwood contributors.

"We took some hits for that story," Suo said. "Some felt it was an unfair comparison, but that's what the numbers showed. That's not to say that Wyden is a sexual harasser. Packwood had an incredible ability to raise money, and we showed that Wyden will inherit that legacy."

The Oregonian's Washington bureau had compiled Packwood's FEC reports from 1979. Suo used Access to join the table of Packwood contributors to the candidate tables. The query yielded nearly 200 hits.

At Willamette Week, Young used an Excel spreadsheet in a similar story on Wyden's Packwood connection. He superimposed the Packwood data onto the recent list of campaign contributors. Young then scrolled down the new list, noting the one-time Packwood contributors that had been active in the campaign.

Simple analysis of the data also showed which candidates received the most money from women's groups, pro-Israel PACs and the timber, insurance and health-care industries.

"Normally, we follow the FEC deadlines and there is a mad scramble to get a list of the biggest contributors," Suo said. "There's never been an attempt to make a comprehensive analysis of where the money was coming from. This allowed us to go a little deeper."

Scanning sees the light

The Oregonian had first crack at the data because Suo scanned in the paper records. Only one candidate handed over information in an electronic format.

"It wasn't difficult to scan individual donations into the database," Suo said. "Using simple macros, we got the information in tab-delimited format and got it into the database. It was much, much faster than data entry by keyboard."

Some candidates were unwilling to give the journalists data on disk although they had all the information on a computer, Suo said. The campaigns feared that the competition would acquire their lists and use them to raise money.

With scanning technology, however, "handing it to us on paper is as good as on disk," Suo said. "They were in the dark on the state of technology."

If data is unavailable on disk, he suggested, the next best thing is to convince the campaign to create a paper form that is scanner-friendly.

Regardless, duplicating the impressive effort in Oregon is not difficult with a little bit of computer savvy, Makinson said.

"A small paper with one inquisitive reporter can unravel patterns that were totally invisible a few years ago," he said. "You can have an incalculable impact, especially if you do it before the election."