Hot out of the Privileges and Elections subcommittee, the eight House members voted unanimously on Tuesday to advance a measure that would create and fund a searchable electronic database for all campaigns and candidates running for office in the Commonwealth. The bill, which was introduced with the same language and patron as HB2140 during the 2025 session, is sponsored by Paul Krizek (D-Fairfax) and calls for the chartering of a brand-new digital campaign finance tool that would update the websites of the pre-millennium Legislative Information System and aging Virginia State Board of Elections. 

This is not the first time that this particular effort has paraded through the General Assembly. The first time this bill was introduced with the same language was back during the 2022 session, during Glenn Youngkin’s first year as Governor, and was introduced by then-Delegate Tim Anderson (R-Virginia Beach). Anderson resigned from the House of Delegates after just one year to run for the Republican nomination in the newly-drawn State Senate District 19 seat in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach in 2023. He was defeated in the Republican primary that June and ran for the House of Delegates District 97 in 2025. He won the Republican primary but was handily defeated by incumbent Democrat Michael Feggans.

Delegate Anderson continues to practice law in Virginia Beach. When asked what piqued his interest in introducing this bill back in 2022, and what he makes of the perennial effort to get it across the Governor’s desk, he responded:

“I am glad to see Del. Krizek pick up where HB86 left off. HB86 passed the House and the Senate, but it was not funded in the budget and therefore never enacted.

Virginia has no meaningful government-controlled searchable database for campaign contributions.  We all use VPAP – which is excellent – but they are a non-profit entity and could close any time or change mission.  The Department of Elections needs a state-run searchable database for campaign contributions and expenses – and hopefully HB44 will make it to the finish line.”

While the old database has its charms, with its cozy columns and ten-point font, Krizek and the members of the Privileges and Elections subcommittee think that it’s long been time for an overhaul. 

California has Power Search, which was established in 2015 as a collaborative effort between non-profit MapLight and then-California Secretary of State (now Senator) Alex Padilla. MapLight reportedly got the site up and running in six months with a shoestring budget of $100,000 and features comprehensive campaign finance reporting, including search engines for contributions to candidates and independent expenditures.

Nearly all states have accepted digital filing and data aggregation as the norm. The sole exemptions are South Dakota and Pennsylvania, which still make allowances for filing campaign finance reports in paper.

The fiscal impact statement states that the State Board of Elections will hire contractors for the construction and maintenance of the site and its infrastructure. A cost estimate of just over half a million dollars is anticipated, as allocated by the biennial budget released under former Governor Youngkin. But where, oh, where, could the Commonwealth find a team of such contractors?

As it happens, Virginia has a service that has featured campaign finance disclosures; one that, in fact, predates the inception of the State Board of Elections and old school LIS websites— the Virginia Public Access Project, or “VPAP”. Founded in 1997 by journalist David Poole, VPAP was the lone digital source for decoding campaign finance disclosures for almost thirty years. Before they came along, all disclosures were stashed away in a series of filing cabinets. Free to access, of course, but that meant marching yourself down to the State Board of Elections buildings and asking a human being to examine or copy them with pencil and paper. When VPAP made the step to digitize these for public access in 1997, it was like bringing fire to the caveman. 

In the decades following, their work has been widely lauded as an invaluable resource for journalists, analysts, and politicians to boot. Still, there have been questions as to the viability of VPAP as a service, if this bill makes it out of committee, through the General Assembly, and across Governor Spanberger’s desk.  

“I think VPAP does a pretty good job,” Krizek said during the subcommittee meeting on Tuesday, in response to a question from Delegate J.J. Singh (D-Loudoun). “It’s really about not relying on private charity to be the one that’s filling in this gap. VPAP relies on donations from the public (…), and four [or] five years from now, they might not be around. They’re a relatively new organization, anyway.”

Krizek isn’t all doom and gloom about VPAP’s chances of survival in the long term, however. 

“This doesn’t mean that VPAP can’t keep doing the same thing,” 

Krizek actually credits VPAP for laying the groundwork for freely accessible digital campaign finance disclosures in the Commonwealth—

“They should be happy that this is happening, and it doesn’t mean that they won’t continue, but this is really a product [of the work] that they’re put together.”

With such big changes proposed for the campaign finance disclosure system, it seemed fitting to try to get a read of the situation from individuals who had seen Virginia’s system through some other big changes. We reached out to David Poole, VPAP’s founder, who kindly replied that he is no longer associated with VPAP since his retirement and would not be able to comment. Delegate Krizek, the patron of HB44 and last year’s HB2140, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

But we had Jeff Schapiro in the Rolodex, and he had some time to talk. A retired columnist of the Richmond Times-Dispatch Politics Desk and local legend (‘Local embarrassment’ is more to the point, he quipped over the phone), Jeff Schapiro witnessed monumental changes to Virginia’s electoral processes during his 45 years of reporting on Virginia politics. Jeff is one of Richmond’s most erudite men-about-town; he worked for the Times-Dispatch for forty years until his retirement last year, and is currently a political analyst on Radio IQ and a scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. We reached out to Jeff to get his read on the situation, discuss campaign finance in the days of yore, and assess VPAP’s prospective market share on the campaign finance front should HB44 be enacted. 

“Virginia campaign finance has always been somewhat on the opaque side,” Schapiro tells me.

“Even though disclosure seems to be the practice that most people— most notably politicians— believe does the trick, the problem, of course, with that in Virginia has always been [that] we have a somewhat outdated disclosure system. The information, the dollars and cents of all of this, are not necessarily as speedily and readily available to the public and the press as both the public and the press might like. [Delegate] Krizek’s bill is fashioned, in some part, to remedy that.”

When asked if Virginia’s Wild West attitude towards having no contribution limit or out-of-state restrictions would be stymied by the goal of an “open government” measure that Krizek references in his defense of HB44. He was skeptical that a database, such as the one described in the measure, would be the deciding factor that ejects ‘big money’ from the economics of any given campaign—

“(T)here have been any number of campaigns in recent years (…) that the dollars are of disputed origin, but that does not seem to have diminished the appetite for these bucks, particularly the appetites of the candidates who benefit from such largess. There are numerous examples of big, big money being thrown around, but a good deal of it [was] less than transparent.”

By this point in the conversation, the terms ‘big money’ and ‘disclosure’ emerge as a leitmotif, and the conversation smoothly transitions to the topic of Bob McDonnell. Once Virginia’s heir apparent to the national Republican stage, his political aspirations were cut short by a humdinger of a scandal during the waning months of his term as Virginia’s 71st Governor. But before he was subpoenaed for accepting gifts and money from Star Scientific exec Johnnie Williams, he was cashing checks from other bigwig donors during his 2005 run for Virginia Attorney General. 

McDonnell received over one million dollars from the Republican State Leadership Committee, a 527 tax-exempt organization. However, Virginians en masse were none the wiser until after he was elected. 

“It wasn’t until Bob McDonnell was in office (…) that the compulsory disclosure form required by the IRS was made public, and it turned out that it was lots and lots of six figure contributions from lots and lots of big money interests— tobacco, the high interest instant loan industry, that sort of thing,”

Though we have become somewhat desensitized to the amount of corporate investment in statewide campaigns in this day and age, the dominant reaction to the disclosure being made public information back in 2005 was, at least from Democrats, disgust.

“The whole thing was considered somewhat sinful, certainly by the Democrats, because it was this big, big, big pile of cash of indeterminate origin; and, obviously, money that represented the whims and wishes of a lot of muscular interests that were essentially concealed, because this fat contribution was generated under a wrinkle in the US tax code.”

While tax exemptions and corporate interest in state politics are the rules rather than the exceptions, we asked how catching these details would have worked in the days before inquiring minds could peruse through disclosure reports on the State Board of Elections website, even before VPAP. 

“It was entirely an exercise in pencil and paper,” 

Jeff sets the scene, pre-Y2K.

“There was a formatted sheet of paper with a cover that was available to candidates through the election officials, and in it, they listed the donations, the donors, the donors’ addresses, and the aggregate figure, if the donor had made previous gifts to a campaign. Also, the funds [spent] by the campaign would be disclosed simultaneously. Again, all of this was a pencil and paper exercise, and it meant submitting these reports, some of which could be, in the case of the statewide candidates, fairly substantial,”

The matter of reporting the contributions in the first place was tantamount to a mind game played out on a sheet of carbon paper, with figures whispered about, but never confirmed, until the eleventh hour. 

“When all of those sheets of paper were bound, it was about as thick as a phonebook. And that would then be mailed to the Board of Elections. The due date was often determined by postmark, and it meant that a lot of these fundraising reports, while public documents, were not necessarily readily available to the public. A lot of this was by design. Candidates wanted to keep their opponents off-balance in terms of how much money they had raised, from whom they had raised it, and how they were spending it,”

“Often, there are lots of stories that are woven through these reports, and sometimes the candidates want those stories told, so they’ll make a point of making available multiple copies of their fundraising reports, and it was something of a rite to see political reporters descend on a campaign office, sit around a long table, going page by page by page, going through campaign finance reports.”

Of course, that particular method of papercut induction is mostly foreign to reporters in the digital age. This is partly due to the work of VPAP, and it may even be made easier by Krizek’s proposed bill. Schapiro, for one, maintains an optimistic outlook—

“As I understand it, Paul [Krizek]’s bill is really about creating a digital warehouse, as opposed to providing crosstabs and analysis, and prayerful consideration of dollars spent here, or dollars raised there. I do think that with more information available, I’m certainly keeping my fingers crossed that the public, the pols, and the press will have more on which to graze.”