Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid and the other forces of darkness in the U.S. Senate may have met their match, in the person of Kuang Chen.

Chen is a 34-year-old computer wizard who runs a startup called Captricity in downtown Oakland and has the crazy notion that transparency can combat corruption, and maybe even save lives.

“We’re an idealistic bunch,” Chen said of himself and the 26 people who work at Captricity. “I would call us the opposite of Beltway bandits.”

Chen’s company is part of a group that won a one-year $270,000 contract with the Federal Election Commission. Its mission will be to drag the Senate, mewling and scratching, into the digital age, though not until next year, after the Nov. 4 election.

Forgive me my rant; I’ve written this before. But U.S. senators, in bipartisan form, insult voters by refusing to submit electronic versions of their reports disclosing donors who fund their campaigns.

Rather than submit their campaign finance reports online to the Federal Election Commission as House and presidential candidates do, senators, in their arrogance, mail their reports to the Senate Office of Public Records, an ironic name.

The tradition of opacity is especially galling this year, when the Senate could flip from Democratic to Republican control, though neither party can claim the high road on this issue. No matter which party is in control, senators try mightily to block the unwashed masses from seeing who pays their way to Washington.

Starting a week ago last Thursday, the Senate office began sending senators’ campaign finance reports to the Federal Election Commission. By last week, 180 reports comprising 114,619 pages had arrived. Senate Minority Leader McConnell, for example, filed an October report that runs 1,063 pages. His challenger’s report ran more than 10,000 pages.

The commission, which tries to post parts of the reports online, was so overwhelmed by the volume that it posted a notice on its website:

“Unusually large paper reports filed by U.S. Senate candidates in the third quarter of the current cycle have overwhelmed our processing capacity, slowing public disclosure of those reports.”

Even when the commission posts the reports, they are useless for any voter wondering about whether Senate candidates are taking money from, say, coal, oil, defense and tobacco companies, and/or from their hometown pastors or high school civics teachers. The reports cannot be downloaded into spreadsheets, searched or sorted.

To get the documents into a more useable form, the FEC delivers the paper to a firm in Virginia, ILM Corp. There, keypunchers type in names of donors, the amounts they give and a few other details. ILM has had the FEC contract since 1998, though its run is ending now that Chen’s company is getting the work.

ILM has a month to produce the third-quarter reports in a form that can be posted online. By then, voters will have decided whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate. Oh, well.

“It is an unbelievably laborious process,” said Ann Ravel, the Federal Election Commission member who was chairwoman of California’s equivalent, the Fair Political Practices Commission.

Thirteen senators voluntarily file reports online, including Californians Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. But of the candidates running in the 10 most heavily contested Senate races this year, only one, Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska, takes that step. Pending legislation would force senators to file reports online. It’s for show. Senate leaders prefer it that way.

That’s where Kuang Chen comes in. Who better to take on the challenge of forcing senators into the light? He knows something of imperious officials: As a high school student in China, his father was dispatched to a rice farm during the Cultural Revolution. As soon as China opened up, the family emigrated to the United States.

Chen arrived at age 9 speaking no English. He spent his childhood in Manhattan, Kan., and other Midwestern cities, attended public schools, got an undergraduate degree at University of Washington and his doctorate in computer science at UC Berkeley.

His 2011 dissertation is titled “Data-driven Techniques for Improving Data Collection in Low-resource Environments.” That may not sound scintillating. But it’s dedicated to “children who are not counted” and focuses on how he used the programs he created to help people who work in clinics in Tanzania and Uganda digitize handwritten notes, the goal being to improve health care.

To old people, like me, he explains what he does like this: His programs provide “a magical service in the cloud that reads handwriting at 99 percent accuracy.” Even bad handwriting, he says.

To his professors, he explained the problem he sought to solve like this: “Unfortunately, the most under-developed communities are still beyond the reach of modern data infrastructure, constrained by limitations in physical and digital infrastructure, in capacity and retention of technical staff and in performance incentives. …

“Even basic vital statistics are still largely unavailable – for example, only 24 percent of children born in eastern and southern Africa are registered, rendering the remaining children invisible to decisions regarding resources and policy.”

He digitized handwritten notes, helping African health care workers track and research people in need, freeing them up to provide care. Through his startup, Chen helped the U.S. Food and Drug Administration digitize reports about the adverse impact of drugs.

Ravel became acquainted with Chen when the Fair Political Practices Commission hired Captricity to use its technology to post conflict-of-interest statements from all California state judges on the FPPC website.

This year, when ILM’s contract with the Federal Election Commission was expiring, a company using Chen and Captricity as its subcontractor submitted a bid, and won.

“It is a little unfair,” Chen said of his company’s advantage over ILM. “It is like a car vs. a horse and buggy. We’re not even on same field.”

Chen’s promise is to transform the documents into digital reports that can be sorted and searched within five days, or fewer.

It all will be fitting, assuming it works as Chen envisions. Washington’s pols will be taken down a notch by a California computer scientist who is here by way of China. Alas, it won’t happen in time for the 2014 election, but that’s because of senators who would prefer that we be kept in the dark.

The Value of Political Corruption

Americans have been pretty cynical about politics since at least Vietnam and Watergate. And key reforms that conservatives sought for decades and finally achieved have done nothing to quiet public distrust of the political class.

In fact, two of these reforms — the ban on congressional earmarks and a series of court rulings that radically deregulated campaign-finance law – have intensified the public’s hostility to both politicians and the political process.

From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of Americans convinced that corruption was “widespread throughout the government in this country” grew from 59 to 79 percent, according to Gallup. In other words, we were cynical already, but now we’re in overdrive.

Over the period from 1964 to 2012, the percentage of voters who said that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves” more than doubled, from 29 to 79 percent, while the share of the electorate that believed government was run for the benefit of all the people” fell from 64 to 19 percent, according to American National Election Studies and data supplied to me by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory.

The ban on earmarks, adopted after the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, has tied the hands of congressional leaders. Still, earmarks, despised by reformers on the left and right, served an essential political purpose. The House and Senate leadership and ranking committee members used earmarks to persuade their reluctant colleagues to vote for or against key bills; they used them as a tool to forge compromise and as a carrot to produce majorities.

The prohibition on earmarks has done nothing to restore respect for Congress. Just the opposite: It has contributed to legislative gridlock and increased the difficulty of winning enactment of tax and immigration reform.

If the goal of the earmark prohibition was to increase the favorability ratings of Congress, it has failed in this regard, too. The public perception of Congress was already deeply negative in 2010, and it has steadily worsened. Polling in June and July reported on RealClearPolitics showed disapproval of Congress averaging 77.3 percent and approval, 12.3 percent.

Meanwhile, conservative-backed, court-ordered reforms of campaign finance law – most prominently, Citizens United v. F.E.C., McCutcheon v. F.E.C. and Speechnow.org v. F.E.C. — have created a system of election financing that reinforces the public’s view that government is run for the benefit of powerful special interests.

A February 2010 Pew poll found that 68 percent of respondents disapproved of the Citizens United decision; 17 percent approved. Disapproval among Republicans stood at 65 percent, among Democrats at 76 percent and among independents at 66 percent.

Under the current court-ordered campaign-finance regime, corporations, unions and the rich can now spend more freely to influence the outcome of elections. This lopsided influence has been buttressed by a series of decisions on the part of the Federal Election Commission that allowed politically active tax-exempt organizations to keep their donors secret, even when these groups were spending money specifically to influence voter choices.

Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, succinctly described the situation to me in an email: “Our political process has increasingly become an accepted system of legal corruption.” He elaborated: “We have an electoral process today in which concepts such as the rule of law, transparency and other democratic values are fraying rather obviously.”

Covering Baltimore politics some 45 years ago, I was struck by how newly empowered ethnic groups used political power to acquire economic power, often dodging city laws and rules to benefit favored constituencies with city contracts, engineering and architectural awards, bond counsel, and so forth. These deals made headlines. But there was a degree of ambiguity to this so-called corrupt activity – it might even be called “good” corruption, which it famously was by George Washington Plunkitt, the turn of the century Tammany Hall enthusiast who coined the phrase“honest graft.” Politicians representing ascendant ethnic constituencies skirted legal and regulatory systems purposely designed by powerful entrenched interests to block emerging competitors.

It was with these thoughts in mind that I raised the question of corruption in a series of emails and phone conversations with sources who study or practice politics. They provided some interesting insights.

Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, took a relatively hard line: “In general, I am an enthusiast for the rule of law and think both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ corruption come with significant costs to that value.” There are, however, “difficult cases,” he acknowledged, “where political entrepreneurs use the public’s fear of corruption to push forward on unrealistic and counterproductive measures – e.g. banning earmarks, open meeting laws, etc. I really don’t think representative government will work very well if such rules are not occasionally bent and stretched.”

Bob Bauer, a leading Democratic election lawyer, pointed to the dangers inherent in the use of the word “corruption” to describe what may in fact be a routine ingredient in the competent practice of politics: “Corruption is an entirely plastic concept,” Bauer wrote, adding “rather than distinguishing between ‘good’ from ‘bad’corruption, we” should “consider the cases in which something is called ‘corrupt’ which is not truly corrupt at all.”

Taking Bauer’s argument a step further, Stan Brand, a lawyer who specializes in cases involving allegations of political corruption who was general counsel to the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 under the Democratic speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., warned that the public’s belief in pervasive political corruption has allowed prosecutors to run amok.

In a phone interview, Brand contended that United States attorneys, in particular, have been adopting a grab bag of legal theories to justify indictments. When they found their way blocked by the courts, Brand argued, they would simply create new legal doctrines to charge politicians with crimes. “They go wherever their theories can work. They take the path of least resistance,” he said.

Charles Stewart, a political scientist at M.I.T., elevated the issue to a more abstract level, suggesting that the issue of corruption could be addressed using the “veil of ignorance” approach of the political philosopher John Rawls:

“What would we want the distribution of public goods to be, if we didn’t know what our status in life would be? We would probably start with a basic quality of life issue — I would want to have high-quality roads and schools. I would want the police to treat transgressions against me without reference to my station in life— and for the police to treat accusations against me without reference to my station in life.

“After that, behind the veil of ignorance, we might agree that it will be necessary, in forming majorities in order to govern, that the winners get access to the spoils of victory — so long as the just distribution of public goods discussed in the previous paragraph were taken care of. So, we might agree that if I’m part of an ethnic group whose party loses an election, I might not get the next park to be built. Or, assuming that everyone has access to the fruits of their entrepreneurial activity, that the government might give extra help to the winners’ supporters in throwing business their way.

“Within this framework, corruption would seem to rest in violating principles of the just distribution of basic public goods —making it so that some people don’t have a just amount, in order that some other people get more than their fair share.”

As a general rule of thumb, reformers, liberal and conservative, are often serving – wittingly or unwittingly – the interests of competing elites.

The best politicians are sensitive to the relative importance of moral considerations as they shift from the public arena to the back room, aware that ultimate judgment of what they have done will be based more on what they produce than how they produce it. Political morality in this context becomes something far less rigid and rule-bound than many in the public conceive it to be – even though, in their own lives, most people act more like politicians than they would like to think.

Effective governance is currently running head-on into growing public skepticism about the legitimacy of political maneuvering and compromise. This reflexive skepticism makes it hard to recognize that politics is a process of negotiation and concession. The perverse consequence is that the art of politics is held in contempt.

Both the court decisions regarding campaign finance and the ban on earmarks betray a certain naïveté about the reality of governing. The expectation of a government free of bribery may be legitimate – but, as I wrote when I was covering Maryland politics, the legal presumption of legislators who are “impartial, disinterested and unbiased in the routine carrying out of daily business, in the context of a system imbued with favoritism, may possibly stretch a democratic form of government beyond its credible limits.”