Significant
improvement in Online Contextual and
Technical Usability and a change in Idaho’s Disclosure Content Accessibility
grade resulted in an improved rank and
an overall grade of C- for the state’s
campaign disclosure program.
Idaho’s campaign disclosure law
requires candidates to file one statement
in non-election years, one statement before
each primary, and two statements before
each general election. Candidates
must disclose contributors’ names
and addresses for contributions greater
than $50, but contributors’ occupation
and employer information is not required,
which is a significant weakness in the
law. Last-minute contributions must
be reported within 48 hours. Expenditures
of $25 or more must be reported and subvendor
information is required. Independent
expenditures, including those made at the
last minute, must be disclosed prior to
an election. Idaho does not have
an electronic filing program.
Idaho’s comprehensive, searchable
contributions database is an achievement,
given that all campaign finance reports
are manually entered by the Secretary of
State’s staff in order to create
the system. However, lack of uniformity
in the data continues to be a problem and
seriously diminishes the value of the records. For
example, the Qwest Corporation’s
Political Action Committee was listed 16
different ways in the database (including “Qwest-Idaho”, “Qwest
PAC”, and the misspelled “Qwest
Idasho PAC”); such inconsistencies
are the reason why the Campaign Disclosure
Project’s model campaign finance
disclosure law recommends the use of contributor
ID codes. The state would do better
in Disclosure Content Accessibility if
it had an online expenditures database,
something that would be fairly easy to
add since itemized expenditure data is
already in an electronic format. The
Secretary of State reports it has new major
additions planned for the site, which hopefully
will include an expenditures database.
Significant
improvements were made in Online Contextual
and Technical Usability during the past
year, bringing Idaho’s
grade in this subcategory up to a B. The
strength of the disclosure site is its
contextual information, including overviews
of candidate campaign finance activity
going back to 1994, a good description
of which records are available online,
and information about disclosure requirements
and campaign finance restrictions. The
Secretary of State’s homepage was
redesigned, and it became easier to locate
the site from the main Idaho web site,
both of which may have contributed to Idaho’s
improved score in the usability testing.
