Just noticed something interesting when comparing Kerry's campaign contributions against President Bush's over at OpenSecrets.org. The OpenSecrets folks track the "quality of disclosure" associated with campaign contributions, described as follows:

"BEST EFFORTS" RULES: When making solicitations, candidates, PACs and party committees must make "best efforts" to obtain and report the name, address, occupation and employer of each contributor who gives more than $200 in a calendar year. In order to show that the committee has made "best efforts," solicitations must specifically request that information and inform contributors that the committee is required by law to use its best efforts to collect and report it.

In the 2000 elections, the average member of Congress fully identified 91% of their contributors' occupations and employers. Seven percent of the occupations were left blank, and the rest were incomplete.

According to the current OpenSecrets data, Bush's stats are:

Full Disclosure: $156,147,934 (93.0%)
Incomplete: $2,378,738 (1.4%)
No Disclosure: $9,309,250(5.5%)

Kerry's, on the other hand, are:

Full Disclosure: $85,533,842 (76.4%)
Incomplete: $762,427 (0.7%)
No Disclosure: $25,619,547 (22.9%)

Bush's 93% compliance seems quite in line with OpenSecrets' 91% average from past Congressional campaigns, but Kerry's number, at 76%, is wildly out of wack.

I'm not a campaign finance expert, so I don't really know what to make of this. Since the data comes from contributors themselves it isn't clear to me whether you can really fault the Kerry campaign for the deficiency --- unless they are supposed to refuse contributions that don't provide adequate disclosure, and that doesn't seem to be the case under FEC regulations as I understand them.

Anybody with more knowledge of such things than I care to chime in?

Update: Digging further, here are the 'Full Disclosure' stats for the other candidates in this year's race:

Dennis Kucinich: 91.2 %
Lyndon H. Larouche Jr: 91.0 %
Ralph Nader: 90.3 %
Al Sharpton: 91.2 %
Carol Moseley Braun: 92.5 %
Wesley Clark: 70.8 %
Howard Dean: 92.6 %
John Edwards: 87.8 %
Dick Gephardt: 89.2 %
Bob Graham: 87.1 %
Joe Lieberman: 92.5 %

So other than Wes Clark, Kerry's campaign is significantly below (by over 10%) any other candidate (even the less-than-serious-ones) in this year's race.

Update Again: Those handy folks at OpenSecrets have a single page which shows all candidates' disclosure statistics.

Footnote: Frank at Franklog was actually on top of this in July.