While
the state’s law has improved
and changes have been made to the Iowa
Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board’s
(IECDB) web site, Iowa still received an
F overall and has significant room for
improvement, especially in Disclosure Content
Accessibility and web site usability.
Iowa
law requires candidates to file one statement
in non-election years and two statements
before an election. For
contributions of $25 or more, candidates
must disclose a contributor’s name
and address, but occupation and employer
are not required. Last-minute contributions
do not have to be reported prior to an
election. Expenditures of five dollars
or more must be disclosed, but subvendor
information does not have to be reported. The
law changed in 2003 to require disclosure
of independent expenditures, including
reporting of last-minute independent expenditures
prior to the election. A bill to
make electronic filing mandatory was introduced
in the House during the 2004 session but
did not pass, so e-filing is still voluntary
for all state candidates.
There
has been very little change in accessibility
of campaign finance records in Iowa, and
the state’s disclosure web site is
still lacking searchable databases of contributions
and expenditures. This is the case
even though some candidates are filing
electronically and their data is in a format
that could easily be made available for
searching; at the very least, the agency
could post those electronic records in
HTML rather than PDF, so they can be sorted
online. On the positive side, disclosure
records are posted to the IECDB site quickly,
and the site is comprehensive.
Iowa’s disclosure web site has been
redesigned, is now easier to navigate and
includes some important new contextual
information, but a drop in the state’s
usability testing score resulted in another
F for Online Contextual and Technical Usability. The
agency has added information to help site
visitors determine whose records are available
online, and now posts a list of total amounts
raised and spent by all legislative candidates. The
site contains good information about campaign
finance restrictions and disclosure requirements,
and the terminology has improved with the
site redesign. Weaknesses in this
category include disclosure reports that
do not show reporting period dates, poor
labeling of amended reports, and a lack
of historical overview information.
