The State of Disclosure in Georgia

Georgia’s campaign disclosure program maintained its overall B in 2005 and remains among the top five, but slipped one notch in the rankings due to the lower score it received in the Online Contextual and Technical Usability category.

Georgia’s disclosure law ranks in the top five in the nation and is particularly strong in disclosure of individual contributor and independent expenditure data. Candidates must report details about all contributors giving more than $100, including occupation and employer, and large, last-minute independent expenditures and contributions must be reported prior to an election. Expenditures over $100 are also reported, but committees are not required to list subvendor information. Electronic filing is required for statewide and legislative candidates reaching certain thresholds, and the agency offers training and a help desk for filers.

Georgia’s disclosure web site provides excellent access to campaign filings, but there is at least one significant issue that needs to be addressed, which is the difficulty experienced by site users when attempting to view filings that include a large amount of data. The June 2005 filing of one gubernatorial candidate, for example, contained over 2,500 itemized contribution listings on a single web page and took more than 20 minutes to load using a high-speed Internet connection. Such a display represents a major barrier to accessing the data (particularly the expenditure data, which shows up at the bottom of the page following the last individual contributor), as most people will not have the patience to wait nearly half an hour to view the information. Additionally, the site still does not give visitors the ability to search by expenditure description and date, both of which are required by law to be disclosed and are available in the browsable filings.

Although Georgia performed relatively well in the 2005 usability test, its score did drop slightly, causing Georgia’s Online Contextual and Technical Usability grade to drop to a D+. Testers felt the web site was easy to understand and generally rated it well, though some lacked confidence in their ability to correctly answer specific questions about candidates’ fundraising using the data online. The disclosure site still needs a thorough data history description, and contains very little information about campaign finance rules and restrictions.

→ Quick Fix: Break up very large filings into smaller pages.  Separating the data into pages with 100 contributions each, for example, would make it much easier to access and browse the filings of candidates raising and spending large sums of money.

♦ Editor’s Pick: Index of reports for candidates clearly differentiates between original and amended reports, and shows exactly when campaign filings were submitted. View image

Disclosure Agency: Secretary of State
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.sos.state.ga.us