Tennessee
made huge strides in the disclosure and
accessibility of campaign finance data
in 2004, and although the state’s
grade has only improved from an F to a
D, the more telling change is in the state’s
rank, which jumped 19 places to number
27. Major improvements in the areas
of electronic filing, web site usability,
and especially Disclosure Content Accessibility,
contribute to Tennessee’s status
as the overall most-improved state in the
nation.
Tennessee
law requires candidates to file once
in non-election years, and once prior
to each election. Candidates must
report detailed information about contributors
who give more than $100, not including
occupation and employer. Large, last-minute
contributions must be disclosed within
72 hours. Expenditures greater than
$100 must be reported, but subvendor information
is not required and there is no disclosure
of independent expenditures. Tennessee
now has an electronic filing system, but
the fact that participation is voluntary
means the state again received an F in
the Electronic Filing Program category.
The
Tennessee Registry of Election Finance,
which has been entering campaign reports
into an internal database for some time
now, debuted a new online searchable database
of contributions in June, bringing up the
state’s Disclosure Content Accessibility
rank from 48 to 26. The change was
enabled by a revision to Tennessee’s
disclosure law which struck the state’s “inspection
notice provision” and made it legal
to display campaign finance data on the
Internet. The reason the state’s
accessibility grade is still low is that
the database can only be searched by contributor
name and contribution date; the system
does not allow the records to be sorted
or downloaded, and there is no database
of expenditure information. Perhaps
these are enhancements that may come in
the future as the agency fine-tunes and
further improves its disclosure web site.
Tennessee’s best performance was
in Online Contextual and Technical Usability,
in which the state received a B and a rank
of six. The Registry of Election
Finance web site is well designed and uses
clear terminology throughout, and features
a wealth of contextual information that
is even more important now that campaign
finance records are available online. Strengths
include current and historical overview
information comparing the fundraising and
spending of all candidates, detailed instructions
to accompany the new searchable database,
and a good description of whose reports
can be viewed through the disclosure web
site. Tennessee’s usability
testing score improved significantly with
the introduction of online campaign finance
data.
