Arkansas’ low rank and overall F
persist in spite of its C in the law category,
mainly because of continued poor accessibility
of campaign finance information, another
F in web site usability – even though
improvements have been made in that area – and
a lack of electronic filing.
Arkansas
requires candidates to file campaign
finance reports quarterly in non-election
years and monthly in election years. Candidates
must file detailed contributor information,
including occupation and employer, for
contributions of $50 or more and detailed
expenditure information for payments of
$100 or more, although subvendor information
is not required. A major weakness
in the state’s disclosure law is
that the filing schedule allows last-minute
contributions and independent expenditures
to be hidden from voters until after the
election. The state has not made
progress toward electronic filing.
The
strength of the Secretary of State’s
web site is that it contains all state
candidates’ campaign finance reports
dating back to 1996, and those reports
are scanned and posted relatively quickly. However,
the usefulness of the reports is severely
limited because they are only available
in PDF, which means that itemized data
cannot be searched, sorted, or downloaded. Making
even a portion of the campaign finance
records – statewide candidates, for
example – available in a more accessible
format would be a major improvement. The
agency does well in providing the public
with access to paper copies of disclosure
records, however at $.25 per page the cost
is at the higher end of what other states
are charging.
While
Arkansas has made improvements to the
usability of its disclosure web site
and now ranks at 38 rather than 47, the
site is still well below the standard for
Contextual and Technical Usability set
by the top states in the study. There
are still no lists of the total amounts
raised and spent by state candidates, and
there is no thorough explanation of whose
records and which reports are available
online. On the bright side, the agency
has added information about the state’s
disclosure requirements and campaign finance
restrictions, a site restructuring resulted
in better terminology, and it became much
easier to locate the campaign disclosure
site from the state’s main web site.
