South Carolina came in next to last place in the study, primarily
due to its lack of electronic filing of campaign finance reports
and the absence of any official campaign finance data on the
Web.
The
state is on the brink of major improvements in online disclosure
of campaign finance information, however, with a bill (H3206)
signed by Governor Mark Sanford in June 2003 that will make
sweeping revisions to the state's campaign finance law and
requiring candidates to file campaign reports electronically.
These changes will be included in the study's next round
of research; South Carolina's grade and rank should improve
significantly next year.
South
Carolina ranked 50th in accessibility to disclosure data
and campaign finance reports, and currently does not
publish any campaign finance data on the Internet, or make
it available on disk or CD-ROM. With a trip or phone call
to the State Ethics Commission, South Carolinians can get
copies of the paper-filed campaign finance records, but
at 50 cents per page the cost is high and may pose an additional
barrier to public access. Hopefully, this situation will
change quickly once electronic filing of campaign data is
implemented.
There are some simple things the state could do to improve
the contextual information on its web site right now, such
as adding a comprehensive list of candidates or recent election
results to its site (which will be more important when there
is actually campaign finance data there to research). A
list of committees with the total amounts raised and spent
in the last election would be helpful as well. One
unique piece of contextual information on the disclosure web
site is a page that lists committees that have failed to properly
file campaign reports, along with the amounts they have been
fined by the Commission.
The
Ethics Commission appears to be doing the best it can considering
it has been handicapped by poor disclosure laws and limited
resources. In its report to the legislature last summer,
the Commission recognized the need for Internet disclosure
of campaign data and named the development of an electronic
filing system as one of its two “key strategic
goals”. Now that electronic filing will be required
by law, the Commission is more likely to get the funding
it needs to implement that goal.
South Carolina's disclosure web site failed
the usability test mainly because there is no data there. Only
a small number of testers were able to find the disclosure
site from the state's main homepage.
