What a terrible problem to have...
Yet it’s had another consequence that has gone all but unnoticed. The campaign finance reports filed by Obama and Clinton have grown so massive that they’ve strained the capacity of the Federal Election Commission, good government groups, the media and even software applications to process and make sense of the data.
A milestone of sorts was reached earlier this year, when Obama, the Illinois senator whose revolutionary online fundraising has overwhelmed Clinton, filed an electronic fundraising report so large it could not be processed by popular basic spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel 2003 and Lotus 1-2-3.
Those programs can’t download data files with more than 65,536 rows or 256 columns.
This is astounding on two levels. For one, the huge influx of money to both campaigns is absolutely unheard of. Can you even imagine how much cash the eventual nominee will have to throw around this fall once we combine forces? Couple that with McCain's pathetic fundraising appeal, and we have a huge money advantage right off the bat, not to mention the luxury of running against the third term of the most unpopular President in US history. Secondly, is the FEC so outdated that they're really still using Excel 2003? They can't be that incompetent, can they?
