The State of Disclosure in Delaware

Delaware’s overall grade slipped from a D- to an F in 2005, and it moved down seven places in the study’s overall rankings. The only category in which Delaware received a passing grade was Campaign Disclosure Law, with continued poor performance in the areas of electronic filing, data accessibility and web site usability.

Candidates are required by Delaware law to report the name and address, but not occupation or employer, of each donor who gives $100 or more.  Similarly, details about expenditures of $100 or more must be disclosed, but subvendor information is not required. There is no reporting of last-minute contributions or independent expenditures until after the election, and enforcement suffers from a lack of mandatory desk reviews and field audits. In theory, Delaware has a voluntary electronic filing program; however Commissioner of Elections staff report that no candidates are currently filing electronically. The agency recently redesigned its filing system, and expects that a large number of candidates will use it during the next election cycle.

The removal of the searchable contributions and expenditures databases from the agency’s disclosure web site—databases which last year contained just a handful of electronically-filed campaign statements—caused the state’s Disclosure Content Accessibility rank to drop from 29th in 2004 to 44th in 2005. What the site does feature is images of scanned filings, in the somewhat cumbersome TIFF format, which means that data cannot be sorted, downloaded or otherwise manipulated online or offline. The agency does post reports to the Internet quickly, and offers a fairly simple interface for browsing filings.

Delaware’s grade in the web site usability category dropped back down to an F in 2005, and its rank in this area fell twenty places, as other states made usability improvements. A redesign of the main section of the state’s disclosure web site did bring with it some improvements in usability, particularly more contextual information and better terminology, but usability testing scores decreased markedly. Testers rated their overall experience on the site poorly, citing confusion about the data and a lack of confidence in their ability to answer specific questions about candidate fundraising using the online data.

→ Quick Fix: Add information to help the public determine whose reports are available online. The disclosure web site includes very little information to help visitors figure out the universe of filings available on the site. If a complete “data history” document is not possible, even a few paragraphs explaining exactly what is and is not on the site would be an improvement.

♦ Editor’s Pick: Links directly into Delaware code relating to campaign finance. View image

Disclosure Agency: Department of Elections
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.state.de.us/election