Louisiana's
campaign disclosure program falls into the top half of the
states, but could be better. Its most significant
strength lies in its law and its weaknesses lie in Disclosure
Content Accessibility and web site usability.
Louisiana
has a better than average campaign disclosure law. Candidates
are required to file annual reports in non-election years, four
reports before a primary election and one report before a general
election. The names and addresses of contributors must
be disclosed for all contributions, however contributors' occupations
and employers do not have to be reported. Last-minute
contributions are also required to be disclosed prior to an election. For
expenditures, vendors' names and addresses and subvendor information
must be disclosed. Independent expenditures and last-minute
independent expenditures are required to be reported before an
election. Louisiana requires statewide candidates who
reach a threshold of $50,000 to file electronically, but
legislative candidates have voluntary electronic filing.
Louisiana
could improve its Disclosure Content Accessibility.
All campaign finance reports are available on the state's
web site. Electronically filed reports are posted as
soon as they are filed and paper reports are scanned-in
and posted when time permits. Louisiana's NIC Technologies
databases, containing only electronically-filed reports,
are especially difficult to use because they are case
sensitive and there are no instructions explaining that.
If a user is not aware of the case sensitivity of the
database, he or she cannot find reports, making it a
significant usability problem. While this is a problem
with all of NIC's databases, it is particularly challenging
in Louisiana because the Governor's report was filed
in all-capital letters and is inaccessible through the database
unless the user knows to enter search terms in all capital
letters. When it was first created several years ago, the NIC
database was one of the better campaign finance database
systems, however, technology has advanced and this system
has not kept pace.
In
addition, while the state does a fair job of making its web
site user-friendly, it could be improved. There are
no lists of the total amounts raised and spent by state candidates
and there is also no list of candidates for recent or current elections. Despite
the shortcomings of its site, Louisiana did well in the usability
testing. All usability testers found the state ethics site
and campaign finance data; most were unable to find summary
campaign information.
