With
an overall score of F, New Hampshire's campaign finance
disclosure program has significant room for improvement. The
state has a better than average campaign finance disclosure
law, but has weaknesses in Electronic Filing, Disclosure
Content Accessibility and Online Contextual and Technical Usability.
New
Hampshire law requires candidates to file campaign finance
statements twice in non-election years and five times in election
years. Information about contributors who give $25 or
more must be disclosed; a contributor's employer and occupation
must be reported for contributions greater than $100. Last-minute
contributions of $500 or more must be disclosed within 24 hours. All
expenditures must be reported, but subvendor information is not
required. Independent expenditures and last-minute independent
expenditures must be reported before the election. New
Hampshire has voluntary electronic filing for statewide
and legislative candidates.
New
Hampshire has a lot of room for improvement in its efforts
to make campaign finance data accessible to the public. While
it does not offer searchable databases of contributions or expenditures,
it does scan paper records and post them to the site in a timely
manner. Unfortunately, the reports that appear on the
web site are often incomplete, missing part of the street address,
city or zip code. Also, the agency has changed from offering
.gif images of campaign finance reports (1998 - 2001) to offering
.tiff images (2002 filings), which require the user to download
software in order to view the reports. The benefit of
the .tiff is that it allows for a higher quality image, but the
disadvantage is that the file type is not usually supported by
standard Internet browsers; either way the public is looking
at scanned images of paper-filed, mostly handwritten documents. In
addition, reports were not available on the site for the current
governor, even though the former governor's reports, as well
as those for other current statewide office holders, were available. No
campaign finance information is on the site for state legislative
candidates.
The
state could also improve the usability of its disclosure web
site. The site's contextual information gives the
public some understanding of campaign financing in New Hampshire,
but could be better. The site does not have lists
of the total amounts raised and spent by state candidates in
New Hampshire, there is no explanation of what reports can be
found online and there are no instructions about how to use it. In
addition, New Hampshire's web site failed the usability test. Only
two out of six usability testers found the disclosure site and
it took more than eight minutes for each to get there. No
usability tester was able to find individual contributor
information.
