Illinois
has one of the best campaign finance disclosure programs in
the nation. However,
its overall B grade shows that Illinois has some room
for improvement, particularly in its campaign finance disclosure
law.
Illinois
law requires candidates to file semi-annual reports in non-election
years and three reports before an election. Candidates must
disclose information about contributors who give more than
$150, but a contributor's occupation and employer is only required
for contributions greater than $500. Last-minute contributions
of $500 or more, made in the last 30 days before the election,
must be disclosed within 2 business days. Expenditures
greater than $150 are required to be disclosed, but subvendor
information does not have to be reported. There is no
independent expenditure reporting. Electronic filing is
required when a candidate reaches a threshold of $25,000
or more (on July 1, 2003, the threshold was lowered to
$10,000).
Illinois
does a very good job of making campaign finance information
accessible to the public. The state makes campaign finance
data available on its web site within 5 days of being filed. Detailed
campaign finance information is available for all electronic
filings, but only summary information is available for paper
filers. There are databases of contributions and expenditures
that can be searched across all filers for individual contributors,
and for dates and amounts of contributions and expenditures. The
state could improve the site by also offering its data
in a downloadable format to enable searching and sorting
offline.
The
contextual and technical usability of Illinois' web site
is the best in the nation. The site features a very clear “Guide
to Disclosure” with details about campaign finance restrictions
and reporting requirements, the text of the disclosure
law, as well as information about proposed amendments to
disclosure rules. There is also a “Money and Elections
Report” that
provides the public with an overview of campaign financing
in Illinois, and clear and thorough instructions appear
throughout the site. Both original filings and clearly
labeled amendments are available; a comprehensive list of candidates
and other contextual information help the public understand
which reports and data are included in the campaign finance
database. Even though the site is rich in contextual
information and it ranked first, Illinois received a B+ grade
in this category, which is due largely to the difficulty of
locating the disclosure agency's web site from the state homepage.
