The BBC reports:
Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander has resigned “with deep regret” after breaking rules on declaring donations.
It came as she faced a one-day ban from Holyrood after failing to register donations to her leadership campaign.
It seems she failed to declare about £10,000:
She later updated her register with details of 10 donors, who each gave […]

Jeff Zeleny at the NYTimes Blog reports:
Senator Barack Obama, as he becomes his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, is starting to exert his authority over the Democratic National Committee. A first step? New fund-raising guidelines.
Mr. Obama is announcing today that the D.N.C. will no longer accept contributions from federal lobbyists or political action committees, which follows […]

WZTV in Tennessee reports:
A campaign finance reform bill to make it harder for candidates to hide the source of their campaign finances appeared to be dead as the 2008 regular session of the Legislature neared an end.

From The Salt Lake Tribune in Utah, a report begins:
The state’s 8-year-old electronic campaign finance reporting system is getting an overhaul, but for now, candidates can change or delete entries to their online documents without explanation or a visible trail.

Hutchinson News Online has more on the reforms passed by the Kansas House:
The chamber overwhelmingly approved four bills making modest changes to state laws governing the handling of political money.
One of the bigger shifts involves shortening a blackout period shortly before an election. The loophole has kept the public from learning about last-minute campaign finance […]

Nicaragua is among the Central American countries that have not lived up to the promises made in November 2006 to increase transparency in the finance of campaigns, according to Transparency International’s report, writes El Nuevo Diario (spanish) last week.

Mentioning short campaign periods and limits on expenditures in privately-owned media, LatioMadrid writes that the rules governing political campaigns are more “clear” and “strict” in Spain than in Latin America, and thus that campaigns are less expensive. They fail to mention that information about campaign donations and expenditures are far more forthcoming in several Latin American countries (e.g. […]

Clarín (spanish) writes that the cross-province fragmentation of parties - which serve as “collectors” and resource supporters for the national candidates - mask the expenditures spent by each coalition. It also recognizes the huge disparity in expenditures for November’s election between the government and opposition coalitions ($17M for Cristina Fernandez’s Frente para Victoria versus $5.7M for Elisa Carrió’s Coalición […]

The Kansas City Star’s David Klepper writes: 
The Kansas House on Friday passed campaign finance bills to require political action committees to give more details about how they spend money and to clarify spending rules for candidates.
All four bills passed easily and now go to the Senate for consideration.
The most significant bill, HB 2408, would require political […]

Yesterday, the BBC reported:
Tory leader David Cameron and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg are among 14 MPs facing a reprimand for declaring donations too late.
The Electoral Commission notes a £7,285 helicopter flight donated to Mr Cameron in 2005 and six donations worth £14,490 to Mr Clegg, dating back to 2006.
MPs have to register donations over £1,000 […]

Tranparency International in Paraguay criticized the presidential candidates, Latinnews.com reports: “On 19 February a local NGO said that so far only presidential front-runner Fernando Lugo had agreed to publish his campaign accounts.”

From the Columbia Tribune Politics Blog:
The Missouri Senate gave initial approval by a voice vote Wednesday to legislation that would rescind caps on campaign contributions. … The bill would also require campaigns accepting donations of $5,000 or more to list the contribution online within 48 hours.
 

In “Stealthy Groups Shake Up Races“, The Wall Street Journal writes about the various outside organizations that are spending lots of money this election outside of candidates and their campaigns:

Since the 2002 campaign-finance reforms, people who want to influence elections have looked for new ways. Most of their early organizations, like the Swift Boat group, […]

The NZ Herald reports:
The Electoral Finance Act has claimed its first scalp after a 21-year-old was obliged to take down his website when the Electoral Commission said it breached election rules by not including his name and address.
Andrew Moore, 21, set up the anti-Labour Party dontvotelabour.org.nz website this month but the commission contacted him soon […]

After months of controversy and heated opposition, the Electoral Finance Bill passed into law today. The provisions according to the summary at the NZ Herald are:
Any group or person wishing to campaign for or against a particular candidate or political party, or policies held by a party, will fall under the third-parties regime…
…will have to […]

This week Feingold and collaborators released more information about their designs to resurrect the public financing system for presidential candidates, reports The Trail. The details:
The legislation would dramatically increase the amount of matching funds candidates received during the presidential primaries. Right now, candidates who opt to accept public financing (only John Edwards and Tom Tancredo […]

The NYTimes posted a front page article on how FEC and Supreme Court decisions has led — and will continue to lead — to a “shift away from 527 groups toward operating in the form of nonprofit, educational organizations” as a way for non-profits to spend unlimited amounts in the upcoming election (purportedly but not […]

The Electoral Commission issued this handbook on the new regulations in Northern Ireland. Based on the UK’s 2000 Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, the new regulations have a list of persmissible donors. For N.I., however, the enumerated list includes a variety of Irish organizations (p. 8 of handbook):

3.4 PPERA specifies a list of individuals […]

The Belfast Telegraph reports an interview with the UK’s Electoral Commission’s new regulations regarding political party finance in Northern Ireland. In brief, parties are now required to disclose their sources of income, which can only come from particular sources in the UK and in Ireland. There are no contribution limits and none of the information collected by […]

Earlier this month, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights issued this report on the French presidential elections (April-May 2007), which discusses some of the campaign finance regulations.
One feature of note is that the only existing penalty for non-compliance with the spending limits is the sacrifice of post-electoral reimbursements, a combination which makes for a […]