Grading State Disclosure

Oklahoma ranked 21st and earned a grade in the B range for the first time in 2008. Oklahoma made strong gains in the Online Contextual and Technical Usability category, moving from an F in 2007 to a C- in 2008.

Oklahoma earned a C+ again in the Campaign Disclosure Law category and ranked 27th in 2008. Oklahoma’s law requires candidates to report detailed information about contributors giving more than $50, including occupation and employer data. Large, last-minute contributions are disclosed prior to Election Day, as are last-minute independent expenditures. A major deficiency in Oklahoma’s disclosure law is that while campaign expenditures over $50 must be reported by amount, date, and purpose, campaign vendors are not reported by name. The state’s mandatory electronic filing program, operated by the Oklahoma Ethics Commission, earned the state an A again in 2008. Both statewide and legislative candidates who reach a threshold of $20,000 must file electronically and benefit from the Commission’s very detailed campaign reporting manual.

Oklahoma earned a B+ and ranked 17th in the accessibility rankings in 2008, up from a B- and 22nd place in 2007. The improvement came as the result of the Ethics Commission reporting in 2008 that paper-filed reports are made available online more quickly and campaign finance data is now available to the public on a disk. Oklahoma offers online, searchable databases of campaign contributions and expenditures that contain both electronic reports and paper-filed reports that have been data-entered by agency staff. The contributions database can be searched by a donor’s name, employer, or zip code, and search results can be sorted online. As noted in the 2007 assessment, the public can search the expenditures database by vendor, but results are not comprehensive as vendor disclosure is not required in the law. Site visitors can download large spreadsheet files containing the contents of the database; but adding the ability to download database search results would also be helpful.

After receiving an F in 2007, Oklahoma improved to a C- in 2008 with a nice redesign of the Ethics Commission’s web site and a stronger usability test performance in 2008. Usability testers rated the site easier to understand than testers did in 2007, and all testers were confident in the data they found on the site. The new site is easier to navigate and offers clearer terminology to guide site visitors. The site could be further enhanced with a listing of candidates for the current election cycle (the site now features a list of candidates that covers many years), and by providing comparisons of totals raised and spent by the candidates for each office to complement the broader lists of the top overall campaigns that cover multiple election cycles.

♦ Editor’s Pick: The “Statistical Information” page offers top ten lists of committees receiving the most contributions, making the most expenditures, and maintaining the largest account balances. View image