Low ranks and grades in three of the four
Grading State Disclosure categories resulted
in another overall F for New Hampshire,
which has seen few changes to its campaign
finance disclosure program over the last
year.
New
Hampshire’s strength is its
disclosure law, which requires candidates
to file campaign finance statements twice
in non-election years and five times in
election years. Candidates are required
to report detailed information for contributors
who give at least $25, including occupation
and employer for those who give more than
$100. Last-minute contributions of
$500 or more must be disclosed within 24
hours. All expenditures must be reported,
but subvendor information is not required. The
state requires reporting of independent
expenditures, and those made at the last
minute must be reported before the election. New
Hampshire has voluntary electronic filing
for statewide and legislative candidates.
New
Hampshire is among the worst five states
in Disclosure Content Accessibility and
there is significant room for improvement.
The disclosure agency web site is still
offering filings in a TIFF format that
requires special software to view and is
inaccessible to some site visitors. No
other disclosure agency in the country
use the TIFF format to display scanned
filings, and New Hampshire would better
serve the public by moving to the more
universally accessible PDF format. The
disclosure web site contains reports only
for statewide candidates; reports for candidates
for the 400-seat House of Representatives
are not available online and can either
be viewed in person at the Secretary of
State’s office or copies can be requested
from that agency.
New
Hampshire is now the worst performing
state in the nation in the Online Contextual
and Technical Usability category, even
though the Secretary of State’s homepage
has been redesigned. It received
the lowest score possible in the usability
testing. A serious problem on the
site is the lack of information about which
candidates’ reports are available
online and where to find them. This
is particularly a problem when it comes
to the Governor’s reports, which
are located in the “Political Action
Committee Filings” section, rather
than the section labeled “Candidate
Filings”. Nothing on the site
states that in order to find a candidate’s
reports a site visitor may need to look
in the PAC section; in fact the terminology
suggests otherwise and likely prevents
many people from locating some reports
that are available.
