New Mexico's disclosure program ranks close to the bottom in
the nation, showing that there is significant room for improvement
in the state's efforts to make campaign finance data accessible
to the public.
Candidates
for office in New Mexico file one campaign finance statement
before the primary and two statements before the general
election, the second of which is due five days before Election
Day. In addition, an annual statement is due in both election
and non-election years. Candidates must provide detailed
information about all contributors, including a contributor's
occupation for those who have given $250 or more. Last-minute
contributions of $500 or more for legislative candidates and
$2,500 or more for statewide candidates must be reported within
24 hours. All expenditures must be disclosed, but subvendor
information is not required. Another important gap in
New Mexico's disclosure law is the lack of independent expenditure
reporting. Electronic filing of campaign statements is
voluntary for all statewide and legislative candidates. The
state does provide candidates with free filing software,
even though funding for electronic filing was described
by agency staff as inadequate.
New
Mexico could do a lot to improve the accessibility of
campaign finance records housed at the Secretary of State's
office and to make its disclosure web site more substantive
and user-friendly. There is no searchable campaign finance
data on the site; instead, paper reports are scanned
and made available online as images, which limits the
usefulness of the information. It can take a long time for
reports to be posted to the site, and viewing them requires
special software that displays records improperly or not at
all on some computers. One good feature of the site is its
comprehensiveness — scanned
reports cover all state-level candidates, include both
original reports and amendments, and date back to the
1998 primary election.
The
usability of the disclosure web site could also be improved,
especially contextual information. For example, the site
does not adequately describe the scope of the records it contains — there
is no statement of exactly whose reports are there, and individual
reports do not include the time period during which contributions
were collected and expenditures were made. To help the
public better understand campaign finance trends in the
state, the agency could add an overview of the information
reported by all candidates; if resources do not allow for an
in-depth, comprehensive analysis, then a simple chart of total
amounts raised and spent by individual candidates would be useful.
Usability
testing results for New Mexico reflect the weaknesses
of its site. Testers could not access the
data to find out how much money was raised by the governor
or locate the names of individual contributors.
