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The State of Disclosure in Utah
Utah earned its first overall passing grade
and ranked 40th in 2008. Utah also earned a
passing grade in the disclosure law category
for the first time in 2008, and improved to
a D+ in the web site usability category after
having failed in that area in 2007.
While
the state still ranks in the bottom ten in
the Campaign Disclosure Law category, Utah
earned its first passing law grade in the
2008 assessment. With the passage of Senate
Bill 246 in 2007, officeholders are now required
to file campaign finance reports annually,
rather than every other year. Candidates are
required to itemize contributions of $50 or
more, though donor occupation and employer
data are not reported. Last-minute contributions
and independent expenditures are not reported
until after Election Day. Expenditure disclosure
is stronger, but candidates do not have to
report subvendor information. Although Utah
does not require candidates to file disclosure
reports electronically, the state’s voluntary
program is extremely popular among filers:
all statewide candidates and 60 percent of
legislative candidates took advantage of the
electronic filing option in the last statewide
election.
Utah
earned a D- in the Disclosure Content Accessibility
category in each of the last four assessments
and ranked 36th in this area in 2008. The
State Elections Office posts data from electronically-filed
reports online immediately and data-enters
records from paper-filed reports within 48
hours of receipt. Contribution data from
both types of filings are contained in an
online database that can be searched by the
name of an individual donor. Currently, a
number of shortcomings noted in previous
reports remain: search options are limited;
candidates’ complete reports cannot be
reviewed online; and users can browse, but
not search itemized expenditure records. The
disclosure web site is being redesigned in
2008 to improve public access to records, and
is expected to launch by the end of the year.
Utah
improved from an F to a D+ in the usability
category in 2008 with a much stronger performance
on the usability test than in 2007. Utah
was one of seven states to achieve the highest
possible rating on the 2008 test; all testers
found the site very easy to understand and
most rated their experience on the site as “excellent”.
A key to Utah’s improvement was that
all of the testers were able to locate the
disclosure site from the state homepage in
2008, which was not the case in 2007. Despite
the strong usability test performance, the
site is lacking several key pieces of contextual
information. As the disclosure site is redesigned,
the agency should consider adding the starting
and ending date for each reporting period
within the index of a candidate’s report, adding
an option for comparing the totals raised and
spent by candidates for each office, and retaining
original data on the site after any amendments
are made.
→ Quick
Fix: Provide summaries of totals
raised and spent by each candidate
for a specific office to complement
the office-by-office summary data.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: “Office
Totals Summary” provides overviews
of the total campaign finance activity
(both contributions and expenditures)
for each statewide office from 1998
through 2008. View
image
 Disclosure Agency: State Elections Office
Disclosure Web Site: http://elections.utah.gov
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