The State of Disclosure in Connecticut

Connecticut received the exact same rank and grade this year as in 2004, with poor performances in the areas of Disclosure Content Accessibility and web site usability being the main cause of the state’s persistent D.

Connecticut does best in the Campaign Disclosure Law category, with stronger disclosure requirements than 30 other states in the country.  Candidates are required to provide details about donors giving $30 or more to their campaigns, including occupation and employer for contributions above $100. Details about expenditures, including subvendor information, also must be disclosed. Connecticut is a good example of why mandatory, rather than voluntary, electronic filing is so important. The state’s e-filing program is mandatory for statewide candidates raising over $250,000, but voluntary for legislative candidates, 95 percent of whom continue to file campaign finance reports on paper.

There were no measurable improvements to Connecticut’s disclosure web site in 2005, though it received a makeover in fall 2005, and the state’s grade in the accessibility category dropped slightly from a D- to an F. The lack of a searchable database of expenditures continues to be a serious deficiency, along with a limited number of search fields in the contributions database. The inability to sort or download data is also a problem, though the agency continues to report it is in the process of developing a mechanism for downloading campaign finance data from its web site in spreadsheet format.

For the third year in a row, Connecticut received an F in the Online Contextual and Technical Usability category, clearly an area in which the state is struggling. The Secretary of State’s disclosure web site has very little contextual information to help site visitors understand campaign finance rules and decipher disclosure reports, and does not offer a basic list of total amounts raised and spent by all candidates. Furthermore, the site structure puts the burden on the site user to determine whether a candidate filed on paper or electronically, and to locate that candidate’s reports in one of two systems for displaying filings. Usability testers expressed a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the data they located, and found the site confusing.

→ Quick Fix: Add information about campaign finance restrictions (such as contribution limits.) Often this information is included in a state's candidate or treasurer manual; if one exists in Connecticut, it could be featured online.

♦ Editor’s Pick: While looking for reports to browse, site visitors can limit the returned list of documents to either originals or amendments. View image

Disclosure Agency: State Elections Enforcement Commission
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.ct.gov/seec/site/default.asp

* The printed version of the 2005 Grading State Disclosure report reflects the fact that campaign finance was administered at that time by the Secretary of the State.