Although
it received a passing grade overall, Utah has significant
room to improve its campaign finance disclosure program. Its
most significant weaknesses are in its law and electronic
filing program.
Under
Utah law, candidates are not required to file campaign
finance reports in non-election years, but must file two reports
before each election. Details about contributors who give
$50 or more must be disclosed, but occupation and employer information
is not required. Last-minute contributions do not have
to be disclosed prior to an election. All expenditures
must be reported; however, subvendor information is not required. In
addition, independent expenditures are not required to be reported
before an election. Electronic filing is voluntary for
statewide and legislative candidates.
Utah
ranked in the top 20 for accessibility to disclosure
content, but still has room for improvement in this area. The official
disclosure web site published by the State Elections Office (under
the purview of the Lieutenant Governor's office) includes itemized
contributions and expenditures for every statewide and legislative
candidate; agency staff data enter records from paper filers. The
database of contributions is comprehensive, but could be improved
to include an expanded contributor search (currently the only
searchable field is contributor name), and the addition of complete
reports for each candidate, instead of just lists of contributions
and expenditures that span several reporting periods. The
web site does not feature a searchable database of expenditures.
Utah
could also improve the usability of its campaign finance
disclosure web site. Although the site features some
good contextual information, more could be added to give
site visitors a better framework for understanding campaign
disclosure in Utah. The disclosure site has an innovative
feature to help visitors to the disclosure site determine
which reports have been filed and are available online
for each candidate, but the site is still lacking a more
general and complete description of what and whose data is
available online. There is summary campaign data showing total
amounts raised and spent by all candidates in each race
since 1998, but the amounts for individual candidates are not
broken out, which would be a more useful tool for comparing
various candidates' activities. Some terminology on the site
could also be changed to help improve usability. For example,
labels for some features on the site are confusing or misleading,
such as the heading “Search
Reports” which actually allows browsing of contributions
made to candidates, and the link “Candidate Contributor
Summary”, which goes to the searchable database of contributors.
