FOR FIVE YEARS, reformers in South Carolina campaigned on a simple principle — that our state had every right to demand that people who spend their money to influence our vote tell us who they are and how much they spent.

And for five years, the anti-reformers hid behind their predictions (which they tried to pass off as assurances) that the U.S. Supreme Court would never allow such a thing. Never mind that all but four other states already required that such basic information be made public.

Fortunately, the reformers prevailed last year, finally overcoming entrenched opposition in the state Senate and passing a campaign finance reform law that ensures that voters will be able to find out who is bankrolling their favorite, or not-so-favorite, candidates.

Even then, the anti-reformers continued to question the constitutionality of the law. Clearly, we were headed for an expensive and protracted legal fight.

Then last month, the Supreme Court swept aside the outlandish predictions about its opposition to public information when it issued what The New York Times declared “the most important ruling on the place of money in politics in a generation.” The sweeping decision, upholding nearly all the provisions of the federal McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, did much more than simply reiterate the right of governments to demand public information about campaign spending. McCain-Feingold takes a far different approach to money in politics, by banning certain types of unregulated fund-raising and spending. Until last month, even the most optimistic of reformers realized there were no assurances that the justices would sign off on that approach.

Except for predictions that it will flood the states with money as special interests look for dodges to the federal law (a flood the states can hold back if they so choose), there has been little talk in the wake of that ruling about how it will affect state-level politics. But while the immediate impact might not be as great, the ruling has the potential to eventually affect state and local elections every bit as much as federal elections.

Here in South Carolina, some effects will be immediate: The ruling should remove any clouds that hung over our own new campaign finance law, and ensure that we don’t have to underwrite years of costly litigation to defend it.

But that’s just the beginning. Here and elsewhere, the ruling should embolden ethics law enforcers, many of whom were cowed into lax enforcement out of overblown fears of what might happen if their actions were challenged in court. Rather than looking for ways to restrict the meaning of the law, and thus stay out of court, perhaps now our regulators will simply insist that candidates and donors obey it.

The ruling also frees South Carolina and other states to go beyond the simple disclosure requirements that have been the mainstay of their own approach to campaign finance law, and begin to ban practices they find detrimental to the integrity of the election process.

In the Congress, Sen. John McCain and other reformers already are planning Reform Part 2, with an eye toward passing new limits they didn’t think possible before. It promises to be an interesting debate.

Some states might follow suit.

And eventually, we in South Carolina might find, as the Congress did, that even armed with information about who was bankrolling whom, voters still feel powerless in the face of a system in which a candidate either gives in to the demands of special interests or else is drowned out by an opponent who did that. We, too might find that, feeling powerless, voters become increasingly disenfranchised and, rather than protesting by voting against the special-interest system, they start dropping out of the system altogether. If that happens here, then we, too, might need to consider outlawing some of the most egregious end-runs around the system.

But not yet.

First, we need to see what happens with our grand renewed experiment in the power of public information. I’d like to hope that our state is still small enough and interconnected enough that voters will believe they can make a difference once they have the information with which to make informed choices.

It’s one thing for a candidate to allege that his opponent is being bankrolled by the gambling industry or the nuclear waste industry or the trial lawyers or insurance companies. It’s quite another for voters to be able to see that for themselves. To see precisely how many dollars were spent on which day by which interest, for which candidate. To see the aggregate. To be able to compare that information to voting records, to help them decide whether elected officials are, indeed, forsaking their constituents in order to grant special favors to their benefactors.

Here in South Carolina, we are about to be able to do that. Whether we take advantage of that ability is up to us.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.