AFTER A bitter two-year struggle, the Legislature agreed in 2003 to close a gaping loophole in our state’s campaign finance law that allowed anonymous donors to spend all the money they wanted trying to influence our votes, as long as they worked independently of the candidates.

But in the process, lawmakers inadvertently opened an even larger loophole — one that will gut the entire contribution reporting system if it isn’t soon closed.

The new loophole, which will apply for the first time to the 2006 elections, allows candidates and others to keep secret the names of the people and businesses who give them any of the money they spend within the last 45 days of an election campaign.

It allows them to ignore the state’s contribution limits — $3,500 for statewide candidates and $1,000 for other candidates — if the money isn’t spent until the last 45 days of a campaign.

In fact, it allows them to ignore every one of the rules that normally apply to campaign contributions, as long as the money isn’t spent until those last 45 days.

The deregulation applies no matter when the money is donated — as long as it isn’t spent until those last weeks of the campaign. That means, for instance, that the governor or a challenger could be collecting $1 million checks right now — checks that they would never have to acknowledge receiving, as long as the money isn’t spent until the final weeks before the 2006 primaries or general election.

Since most spending occurs during those final 45 days, it’s possible that a candidate could run an entire campaign without telling the public where a penny of the money came from, and without adhering to any of our state’s restrictions on donations.

Last year, the Senate and House both passed a bill that, among other things, closed the loophole; but time ran out before they could agree on the wording of the fix and other issues in the bill. Fair enough.

But so far this year, no one has even introduced legislation to close the loophole that will render South Carolina’s landmark 1991 campaign finance law obsolete, and make South Carolina the only state in the nation where a candidate could raise all of his campaign money free of regulation or even public disclosure.

House Speaker David Wilkins said he wasn’t aware of the problem. But he readily acknowledged that it needed to be corrected, and suggested it should be reviewed by a special panel he recently appointed to propose changes to the ethics and campaign finance law.

After I asked Sen. Tom Moore about it late last week, he told me on Tuesday he has asked staff to draw up a bill to close the loophole. “I don’t envision anybody in the Senate having any problems (with the fix), nor the House, once it’s thoroughly looked at,” he said.

No one suggests that the Legislature obliterated the campaign finance law on purpose. Instead, it was caused by that all-too-common practice in the State House of waiting until the last possible minute to work out disagreements over complicated bills. Often, such delays are used by competing sides on an issue to force concessions.

The 2003 bill into which the loophole was inserted was designed to make third-party groups file public reports when they spend money to influence how we vote, just as candidates have to do. A controversial part of the bill applied the reporting requirement to ads that ran during the last 45 days of a campaign but didn’t come out and call for the election or defeat of a candidate. The ads, which often concluded with, “Call Senator Smith and tell him that’s just not right,” had cropped up at the federal level as a way to get around reporting requirements.

House negotiators wanted to make sure that only the reporting requirements, and not the limits on contribution amounts, applied to people who didn’t “expressly advocate” the election or defeat of a candidate. And on the last day of the 2003 legislative session, they came up with language that both they and Senate negotiators thought would do the trick.

But they put the wrong language into the wrong part of the bill. And the result — in a complicated sentence with double negatives — was a bill that said money spent during the last 45 days of a campaign is not a “contribution.” That means that none of the campaign finance laws apply to it. It wasn’t until after Gov. Mark Sanford signed the bill into law that the error was discovered.

The story gets more complicated. Last year, when the Senate was trying to close this loophole, a Senate committee injected another loophole into the bill. Like the original error, this one almost certainly occurred because the Legislature had delayed its most important, and complicated, work to the end of the session, when committee staff and legislators were so plowed under that they weren’t paying enough attention. That new loophole played a role (although a minor one) in the inability of the House and Senate to get the first loophole closed.

Sen. Moore says the back-to-back errors in the legislation “point out the fact that we need to spend more time on the front end of the session to get things like that looked at” and avoid the “mad dash of trying to get something done” at the last minute.

He’s right. But let me point out a more immediate concern: We are halfway through the legislative session — and fast approaching “mad dash” time once again — and nothing has been done to close the loophole that did get into the law. There will be no forgiving our legislators if they let another year pass without stuffing the guts back into our campaign law that they disemboweled in 2003.

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