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The State of Disclosure in Kentucky
Kentucky
maintained its overall C+ but fell out of
the top ten to 13th, as other states improved. Its
strengths are still in the areas of Campaign
Disclosure Law and Disclosure Content Accessibility,
and its only major weakness is in electronic
filing.
Kentucky’s
disclosure law is among the best in the country
and requires candidates to report detailed
information about contributors giving more
than $100, including occupation and employer.
Expenditure disclosure is excellent and reports
must include subvendor data and accrued expenditures.
However, reporting of last-minute contributions
before the election is required only of gubernatorial
candidates, and last-minute independent
expenditures are not reported until after
the election. Statewide and legislative candidates
have the option of filing reports electronically,
but are not required to do so.
The
Registry of Election Finance’s web
site contains a comprehensive searchable database
of contributions that is well designed and
is accompanied by an extensive tutorial and
user guide. The law requires disclosure filings
to be posted online within ten days, but the
agency reports it has a strong record of online
disclosure in half that time. The biggest
deficiency of the state’s disclosure
site is still the lack of an expenditures database.
Itemized expenditures are only available online
for electronic filers, and are not data-entered
from paper filings.
Kentucky
added the ability to view both original filings and amended
reports in 2005, and specific transactions
that have been amended are now highlighted,
with original transactions available in a
pop-up window. This unique
system gives site visitors a way to easily
track revisions to the data, and also provides
them with a much better sense of a particular
candidate’s filing history. This
major improvement was unfortunately offset
by a significant drop in Kentucky’s usability
test score, which is the reason the state’s
grade for usability actually dropped from a
C+ to a C. Some testers lacked confidence
in their ability to draw accurate conclusions
about a candidate’s total spending using
data on the site, and others found the terminology
confusing.
→ Quick
Fix: Add some functionality
to the contributor search by adding “name
contains” and “name begins
with” search
capability.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: Handling
of amendments, as described above. View image
 Disclosure Agency: Kentucky Registry of Election Finance
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.state.ky.us/agencies/kref
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