Although it received a passing grade, Indiana has significant
room to improve its campaign finance disclosure program, particularly
in the Campaign Disclosure Law and Electronic Filing Program
categories.
Indiana law requires candidates to file one report in non-election
years and one report before an election. Candidates
must disclose information about individuals who contribute
$100 or more; for contributions of $1,000 or more a contributor's
occupation, but not employer, is also required. Last-minute
contributions of over $1,000 must be reported within 48 hours
of an election. Expenditures of over $100 must be reported,
but subvendor information does not have to be disclosed. Independent
expenditures are not required to be reported. Indiana
has voluntary electronic filing for both statewide and legislative
candidates.
Indiana does a fair job of making campaign finance data available
to the public. Disclosure agency staff manually enter
statements that have been filed on paper into a database,
and it can take up to two weeks for the campaign finance information
to be posted on the web site. Indiana's comprehensive
searchable databases of contributions and expenditures contain
itemized data dating back to 1998. The databases would
be better if they allowed the public to search for an expenditure
by description, to sort records online and to download data
for analysis offline.
In
terms of web site usability, Indiana is one of only a
few states that does a really good job of informing the
public what campaign finance information can be found
there, through a page including answers to questions
such as “what does the database contain?”, “whose
records are included?”, and “when
are records available?”. Some significant gaps exist
in Indiana's web site, however; the state could add a list
of the total amounts raised and spent by state candidates,
and lists of candidates for recent or current elections.
Usability scores for Indiana's web site reflect the need
for improvement. Testers found individual contributor information,
but none of the summary numbers matched.
