Kansas has made few improvements to its
campaign finance disclosure program in
the last year, and all of its category
grades still fall in the D and F range,
indicating there is significant room for
improvement.
Kansas
law requires candidates to file one report
in non-election years and one report
before each election. Candidates
must disclose information about contributors
who give more than $50, including a contributor’s
occupation for contributions greater than
$150. Contributors’ employer
information is not required. Details,
including subvendor information, must be
disclosed for expenditures greater than
$50. Independent expenditures must
be reported up until twelve days before
an election, but last-minute independent
expenditures do not have to be disclosed
until after the election. Last-minute
contributions are also not reported prior
to the election. Kansas does not
have an electronic filing program.
It
became more difficult to access campaign
finance data in Kansas during 2004, and
the state’s grade in this area fell
from a D- to an F. The primary reason
for the drop was an increase in the cost
of paper disclosure records from $.25 to
$.50 per page, and an increase in the amount
of time – up to eight weeks – it
takes for records to be posted online after
they are filed. The database of contributions
on the Governmental Ethics Commission web
site can still only be searched by donor
name and date of contribution, (not by
amount, donor’s zip code or occupation,)
and expenditure information is not available
online. A major weakness in Disclosure
Content Accessibility is the inability
to browse complete filings online.
The
state’s only area of improvement
was in Online Contextual and Technical
Usability. Lists of candidates on
the disclosure web site now include party
affiliation, and the state’s usability
testing score improved, due in part to
the fact that it became easier to locate
the Governmental Ethics Commission site
from the main Kansas web site. Because
of these improvements, Kansas’ rank
in this category climbed from 45 to 20. Summary
information for candidates can be found
through the “quick statistics” menu
on the disclosure site, although the format
makes it difficult to quickly compare total
amounts raised and spent. The site
still lacks in contextual information,
however, and would benefit from the addition
of a comprehensive data history page and
more thorough instructions for accessing
the campaign records.
