Rhode
Island's high grade in disclosure content accessibility
helps boost its rank to eleven overall, but it has some room
for improvement. The state has an average Campaign Disclosure
Law and poor web site usability.
Candidates
are required by law to file quarterly statements in non-election
years and two statements before each election, with the
last statement filed seven days before Election Day. Details,
including information about a contributor's employer, must be
disclosed for contributors who give $100 or more. Last-minute
contributions are not required to be disclosed, except by statewide
candidates receiving matching funds, who must file contribution
reports daily in the last seven days before an election. Expenditures
over $100 must be disclosed, but subvendor information is not
required to be reported. Independent expenditures are
disclosed, including those made at the last-minute. Rhode
Island has mandatory electronic filing for statewide candidates
but electronic filing is voluntary for legislative candidates
until 2004. The state provides free, web-based filing
software and technical assistance for candidates who use
the electronic filing system.
Rhode
Island has come a long way since 1999, when there was
no campaign finance data available on its web site and
the state received a “Dark Skies” rating in the California
Voter Foundation's Digital Sunlight Awards study. Today
the official disclosure web site contains databases of
contributions and expenditures from electronically filed records
that are searchable on a number of fields. The site
also features records for each candidate that can be browsed
online in PDF format.
There
are some terminology and technical usability problems
with the data portion of the web site that made it difficult
to locate data in some instances and resulted in a poor
usability test score, but for the most part the site works
well and is easy to navigate. To help people make sense
of the wealth of data online, Rhode Island could increase the
contextual information on its web site. The site does
provide a good explanation of the state's disclosure requirements
and law, and includes enough detail about individual filings
for researchers to determine whose reports are online and whose
are not included in the system. Rhode
Island lost points in this category because reporting periods
are not labeled in an index of a particular candidate's reports,
and there are no lists of the total amounts raised and spent
by state candidates.
