There
have been few changes to Minnesota’s
campaign disclosure program in the past
year, but a much-improved score in the
usability testing brought up the state’s
Online Contextual and Technical Usability
grade from an F to a C, and helped improve
its overall grade from a D- to a D.
Minnesota’s disclosure law, which
ranks sixth in the nation, requires candidates
to file one report annually and one report
before each election. Details must
be disclosed for contributions of $100
or more, including a contributor’s
occupation and employer. Last-minute
contributions must be disclosed prior to
an election. Details about expenditures,
including subvendor information, must be
reported for expenditures of $100 or more. Independent
expenditures are required to be disclosed,
but last-minute independent expenditures
do not have to be reported prior to an
election. Minnesota has a voluntary
electronic filing program for statewide
and legislative candidates.
Minnesota’s biggest weakness is
in access to campaign finance records,
and the state’s rank has dropped
in this category. The same problems
that were described in Grading State Disclosure
2003 – namely a cumbersome system
for viewing campaign contributions and
the unavailability of complete filings
online – remain and are the reason
for the state’s poor grade in Disclosure
Content Accessibility. It takes up
to three weeks for the contributions data
to be posted on the Internet, and there
is no expenditure data available online. Redesigning
the Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure
Board site will take time and resources,
but there are things that could be changed
relatively easily. For example, it
would not take much effort to replace the
pull-down list of all contributors in Minnesota
with a search field where the partial name
of a contributor could be typed.
Although
there were no significant changes to
the state’s disclosure web site
in 2004, Minnesota’s grade in the
area of web site usability rose significantly
due to a much better score in the usability
testing. Even so, the site still
lacks important contextual information,
such as a thorough explanation of which
candidates’ contribution information
is available online. More importantly,
because of the design of the campaign finance
records section, it is still difficult
for those with slow computers or Internet
connections to make use of the data. The
addition of browsable campaign finance
reports would not only enhance accessibility,
but would also improve the state’s
usability grade, because some components
of Online Contextual and Technical Usability
are dependent upon the availability of
browsable filings.
