Minnesota
barely received a passing grade, showing that its campaign
finance disclosure program has significant room for improvement. Despite
having one of the strongest campaign finance disclosure laws
in the country, Minnesota received failing grades in Electronic
Filing, Disclosure Content Accessibility and web site usability.
Minnesota
law requires candidates to file an annual
statement and one statement before each election. Details,
including a contributor's occupation and employer, must
be disclosed for contributions of $100 or more. Last-minute
contributions must be disclosed prior to an election.
In addition, details about expenditures, including subvendor
information, must be reported for expenditures of $100
or more. Independent expenditures are required to be
disclosed, but last-minute independent expenditures do
not have to be reported before an election. Although
there is adequate funding, training and free software for electronic
filing, the fact that electronic filing is voluntary
for both statewide and legislative candidates brings down Minnesota's
grade in this category.
Minnesota
has significant room for improvement in its efforts to
make campaign finance data accessible to the public.
Detailed information about contributions over $100 is
available on Minnesota's web site. While the state says this
information is available in a searchable database of contributions,
the system does not allow a search at all. Instead, a
site visitor must browse through a list of every individual
contributor in the system and choose one name in order to view
that individual's campaign contributions. Even if a site user
can get through this cumbersome process and locate an individual
contributor, the only information available is the amount
and date of the contribution, and the name of the candidate
to whom the contribution was made – there is no other detail
or identifying information, such as address or city, employer
or occupation, for the contributor. It is not possible
to sort or download the data. In addition, complete campaign
finance reports are not available for browsing on the site.
The
contextual usability of the site could also be significantly
improved. There is some useful information on the site,
including a good explanation of campaign finance laws in
Minnesota, lists of recent changes to the law, an “Informal
Chronology of Campaign Finance Legislation”, and information
about current administrative rules and opinions. The
site also provides good summary data to give the public an
overview of campaign financing in the state for the years 1998
- 2002. However, the terminology on the site is not very clear.
In addition, amended data is not available on the site, and
it may be difficult for the state to provide it without also
adding an interface for browsing self-contained electronic
reports (as opposed to the current system of searching for
bits and pieces of data). The site could also provide instructions
for how to use it and could be more accessible to people with
slow computers.
