California
has the strongest campaign finance disclosure
law and the second best campaign finance
disclosure program in the country. Major improvements in
Disclosure Content Accessibility and web
site usability account for the state’s
climb from a C to an A- overall.
California
law requires candidates to file two or
more reports in non-election years and
two reports before an election, in addition
to ongoing 24-hour reports of contributions
of $1,000 or more in the 90 days preceding
an election. Candidates
must disclose detailed information about
contributors who give $100 or more, including
occupation and employer. Both donors
and candidates must report last-minute
contributions prior to an election. Candidates
must file detailed expenditure information
for payments of $100 or more, and must
report how their subvendors spent payments
of $500 or more. Independent expenditures
must be reported and last-minute independent
expenditures of $1,000 or more must be
reported within 24 hours. Electronic
filing is mandatory for statewide and legislative
candidates who reach a $50,000 threshold.
The
reason for California’s much-improved
grade and rank in accessibility of disclosure
data is the addition of searchable databases
of contributions and expenditures, which
debuted on the Secretary of State’s
web site in July of 2003. The
databases, while not comprehensive (paper
filers’ information is not
data-entered as is done in a number of
other states,) do offer site visitors the
ability to search and sort on a number
of fields and across all electronic filers. For
some reason, conducting an expenditure
search requires the user to first choose
an expenditure code, effectively limiting
the usefulness of the search; eliminating
that requirement would be a further improvement.
While
the Secretary of State’s office
isn’t publishing the kind of comprehensive
campaign finance analyses it made available
in the 1990s, it is possible to use the
new database to generate a list of candidates
and the total amounts raised and spent
by each, which is a big reason California’s
usability grade improved from a D- to a
B+. Other contextual information
is still lacking, however, such as a summary
of the state’s campaign finance restrictions
and disclosure law. Terminology could
be improved, particularly the text of the
link to the searchable databases, which
is called “Advanced Reports”. Many
visitors to the Cal-Access web site instead
click on the “Campaign Finance” link,
(where complete reports can be browsed)
and end up missing the best part of the
web site. Finally, California’s
usability testing score improved substantially,
perhaps because it became easier to locate
the disclosure site from the main state
homepage.
