With
its rank of 39 and overall grade of an F, Kansas has significant
room to improve its campaign finance disclosure program, especially
in the areas of Electronic Filing and Online Contextual and
Technical Usability.
Kansas
has a below average campaign finance disclosure law. Candidates
must file one report in non-election years and one report before
each election. Candidates must disclose information about
contributors who give more than $50 and a contributor's occupation
must be reported for contributions greater than $150. Last-minute
contributions are not required to be reported. Detailed
information, including subvendor information, must be disclosed
for expenditures greater than $50. Independent expenditures
must be reported up until twelve days before an election, but
last-minute independent expenditures do not have to be disclosed
until after an election. Kansas does not have an electronic
filing program.
Overall,
Kansas' effort to make campaign finance data accessible to
the public is below average. Considering that the Governmental
Ethics Commission staff goes to the trouble of data-entering
information from the receipts schedules filed by candidates,
there could be a better search interface and better access to
the itemized data online. There is a database of contributions,
but it is only possible to search for the donor and amount of
a contribution. The data cannot be sorted online or downloaded
for analysis offline, and disclosure records are not available
in any other digital format. The site states that expenditure
information is entered, but none is available online.
The
site's usability also needs improvement. Even though
statistical summaries of campaign finance data for legislative
elections are available by e-mail from the agency, that information
is not provided on the site. A list of candidates for
current elections is featured on the site, but it does not include
party affiliation. There is also no information about
whose reports are online, no instructions about how to use the
site and no listing of reporting periods. In addition,
original campaign finance filings are not retained online when
amendments are made to them. Despite the need for improvement,
Kansas did fairly well in the usability testing. All usability
testers found the disclosure web site and most found the
campaign contribution data.
