For
the third year in a row, Nebraska received
an overall F for its disclosure program,
and while its law remains relatively
strong and ranks 17th in the nation,
the state’s rank in the web site
usability category fell to 50th in 2005.
Nebraska’s
disclosure law requires candidates to
report detailed information about contributors
giving more than $250, not including
their occupations and employers. Large,
last-minute contributions and independent
expenditures (over $1,000) are reported
before Election Day. Expenditure
details are provided for expenditures greater
than $240, but reports do not include subvendor
information. Nebraska does not have
an electronic filing program, and does
not currently have plans to introduce one.
The
Nebraska Accountability and Disclosure
Commission added a search feature to its
web site in 2005, but the only field is
contributor name, and that is limited further
to organizational contributors; searching
for specific individual donors produces
no results. The system represents
a good first step, but needs to be greatly
expanded if the agency wishes to give site
visitors any real capacity for analyzing
filings and identifying patterns of giving
across all filers.
The
Commission’s statement that “campaign
finance data is currently fully accessible” in
Nebraska is surprising given its grade
and rank in the Online Contextual and Technical
Usability category, not to mention its
grade for data accessibility. Testers
participating in the usability test certainly
disagreed, with all finding the site confusing
and most rating it poorly overall. Nebraska’s
score in the usability test dropped significantly
in 2005, and one reason may be that the
interface for locating campaign filings
no longer includes lists of candidates,
making it more difficult to find and browse
reports. A list of candidate committees
mitigates the situation to a certain degree,
but is in a separate section of the web
site and does not include office, district
or party affiliation information.
→ Quick
Fix: Replace the
various page backgrounds on the Commission’s
web site with a simple, uniform design. Many
of the backgrounds are either distracting
or make it difficult to read the text
on the page, and updating them would
both unify the site design and ease
navigation.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: The
full text of the Accountability Act and
Campaign Finance Limitation Act
are available and highlighted on
the agency’s
web site. View image
