Connecticut's
campaign finance disclosure program is ranked in the upper
half of all of the states. Despite
its fairly strong campaign finance disclosure law, Connecticut
does poorly in Electronic Filing, Disclosure Content
Accessibility and web site usability.
Connecticut
law requires candidates to file quarterly statements in non-election
years and two statements before an election. Candidates
must provide information about contributors who give $30 or more
and a contributor's occupation and employer are required for
contributions greater than $100. Last-minute contributions
do not have to be reported prior to the election. Candidates
and committees must itemize all expenditures and subvendor information
is required. Although independent expenditures must be
reported, last-minute independent expenditures are not disclosed
until after Election Day. Electronic filing is mandatory
for statewide candidates, but the high threshold of $250,000
means that campaign finance data about some significant candidates
for statewide office may not be easily accessible to the public. Electronic
filing is voluntary for legislative candidates.
Although
it received a passing grade in Disclosure Content Accessibility,
Connecticut could vastly improve its efforts to make
campaign finance data available to the public. The state
posts campaign finance data on its web site in a timely
fashion and has a database of contributors online, but
the database only allows searches by the name of a contributor.
There is no searchable database of expenditures. Data
cannot be sorted or downloaded for searching offline.
One helpful feature on the web site is an option to browse
data by zip code or employer, within the campaign finance
records of one candidate.
The
usability of the web site is also lacking. There
is no information about Connecticut's campaign finance laws or
lists of total amounts raised and spent by statewide and legislative
candidates. Connecticut could improve its online usability
by putting contextual information on the same web site as its
campaign finance data. Currently, campaign finance data
is located on the Secretary of State's site, but contextual information
is on the State Election Enforcement Commission's page. Having
the information on separate web sites makes it hard for the public
get a complete picture of campaign financing in the state. The
usability testing scores for this site are average and
show room for improvement.
