While
it is ranked in the upper half of the states, Colorado's
campaign finance disclosure program has room for improvement.
Its strengths lie in its law and efforts to make campaign finance
information accessible to the public, but Colorado's electronic
filing program and web site usability could be significantly
better.
Colorado's
law requires candidates to file quarterly campaign finance
statements in non-election years and four reports before
each election. Candidates must disclose detailed information
about contributors who give $20 or more and a contributor's
occupation or employer is required for contributions
of $100 or more. Last-minute contributions must be reported
before an election. Independent expenditures must be
reported and last-minute independent expenditures must
also be reported before an election. Colorado's voluntary,
rather than mandatory, electronic filing program, along with
a lack of both adequate funding and a standard filing format,
brings down its grade in this category.
One
of Colorado's strengths is its effort to make campaign finance
information accessible to the public. Campaign finance
data is available on the campaign disclosure web site within
24 hours of being filed. The site features electronically
filed reports and scanned-in versions of reports filed on paper. It
also has comprehensive searchable databases of contributions
and expenditures, containing records that were either data entered
by agency staff or electronically filed by candidates. There
are some technical problems with the site, however, and
it is not possible to search the contributions by zip code
or employer, to search the expenditures by description, or to
download the data for analyzing offline.
While
there is a lot of data on Colorado's disclosure web site, there
are also a number of significant usability and terminology
problems that limit the value of the information. The usability
of the site is weakened by a lack of important contextual information,
such as a list of the total amounts raised and spent by state
candidates, and an explanation of which candidates records
are featured on the web site. Also, original filings are not
retained online when amendments are added to the site. Colorado's
usability testing scores reflect the weaknesses in the
usability of its web site.
