The State of Disclosure in Missouri

A significant improvement in the Online Contextual and Technical Usability category helped bump Missouri’s overall grade from a C- to a C+ and improve its overall rank from 17 to 15. Missouri’s Campaign Disclosure Law continues to be a strong point, and places among the top ten in the country.

Under Missouri law, candidates must report detailed information about contributors giving over $100, including occupation and employer. Last-minute contributions are reported before Election Day, but last-minute independent expenditures are not. Disclosure of loan details is particularly strong; expenditure disclosure is also good, but details about subvendor payments are not included. Statewide candidates raising more than $15,000 must file reports electronically, but e-filing is voluntary for legislative candidates. House Bill 525 in the 2005 legislative session included a provision that would have lowered the statewide candidate e-filing threshold to $5,000, but the bill was vetoed by the governor.

Two small improvements resulted in a higher grade for Disclosure Content Accessibility this year and moved Missouri into the B range in this category. The Ethics Commission reduced the price of paper copies of reports from 25 cents to 10 cents per page, and made it possible to search the contributions and expenditures database by street, city or zip code, rather than just city. The database only contains the electronically-filed records of statewide candidates, but legislative candidates’ records, filed on paper, are scanned and posted to the Internet within one day.

Missouri received a significantly higher score in the usability test in 2005, raising its grade in Online Contextual and Technical Usability from an F to a D, and its rank nine places, from 40th to 31st. Even with the increase, Missouri’s performance in the test was just average. Testers had an easier time locating individual contributions and summary information for the governor in 2005, and expressed greater confidence in the accuracy of that data, but some found the site’s terminology confusing and gave the site only a fair rating. It became easier to locate the Ethics Commission web site from the state’s homepage, and the Commission added a simple but important note to its site regarding pop-up windows, which it uses to display searchable database results.

→ Quick Fix: Improve site navigation by changing the color of visited links.

♦ Editor’s Pick: For each candidate, site visitors can view a listing of reports, the method by which they were submitted, and their posting status (i.e. “scanned” or “received but not scanned”). View image

Disclosure Agency: Missouri Ethics Commission
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.moethics.state.mo.us