A lower grade in the web site usability
category bumped California from 2nd to
3rd place in the overall rankings this
year, but the state still has one of the
best disclosure programs in the country,
with strengths particularly in the areas
of disclosure law and data accessibility.
Candidates
in California must report the name, address,
occupation and employer of donors who
give $100 or more to their campaigns. Last-minute
contributions must be disclosed before
Election Day. The
law requires detailed disclosure of all
expenditures of $100 or more, including
a breakdown of subvendor information. The
only deficiency in the state’s law,
as measured by this project’s criteria,
is that the dates expenditures are made
are not required to be reported, though
many committees report this information
anyway. Electronic filing is mandatory
for state-level candidates who reach
a $50,000 threshold, and as of September
2005, candidates can file reports using
a new, free web-based filing system on
the Secretary of State’s web site.
California’s “Cal-Access” web
site features searchable contribution and
expenditure databases of electronically-filed campaign data going back to 2000.
The functionality of those databases
and the fact that reports are available
online in real-time as they are filed,
place California in the top five states
in the country for Disclosure Content
Accessibility. One
major limitation of Cal-Access is that
once a filing has been amended, the original
report is no longer linked from the committee’s
filing history page, though it is still
online. To give site visitors an
even more complete picture of each candidate’s
campaign finance activity, the agency could
provide links to both original and amended
reports.
The
state’s grade for Online Contextual
and Technical Usability dropped from a
B+ to a D+ in 2005, due to a far lower
score on the usability test this year than
in 2004. Testers had trouble finding
summary campaign finance figures for the
governor, lacked confidence in the accuracy
of the figures they did locate, and universally
found the site confusing. The poor
usability test scores may be a reflection
of any number of things relating to the
site structure or the data itself, including
perhaps that there are no less than seven
campaign committees associated with the
current governor.
→ Quick
Fix: Add information
about campaign finance restrictions. The
Cal-Access web site could be improved
by adding some written information
or even a simple chart about campaign
fundraising and spending rules.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: Comprehensive
18-page User Guide and quick reference
guide for the searchable databases. View image
