While
its rank dropped from two to five, Illinois
still has one of the best campaign finance
disclosure programs in the country. The
state’s campaign disclosure law remains
an area of weakness, however, and prevents
the state from achieving an overall A.
Illinois
law requires candidates to file semi-annual
reports in election and non-election
years, plus one report before an election.
Candidates must disclose information about
contributors who give more than $150, but
a contributor’s occupation and employer
is only required for contributions greater
than $500. Last-minute contributions
of more than $500 must be disclosed within
2 business days. Expenditures greater
than $150 are required to be disclosed,
but subvendor information does not have
to be reported and there is no independent
expenditure reporting. Legislation
signed by the Governor in August of this
year changed some provisions of Illinois’ Campaign
Financing Act and may improve the state’s
law grade in 2005. Electronic filing
is required for statewide and legislative
candidates who reach a threshold of $10,000.
The
State Board of Elections offers an excellent
interface for browsing reports online,
as well as model campaign finance databases
for searching both contributions and
expenditures on a wide variety of fields. Mandatory
electronic filing allows the state to make
most campaign finance data available online
immediately. Data accessibility could
be further enhanced with the addition of
downloadable data and the availability
of detailed information for paper filers
online (the site now includes only summary
numbers for those filers.) Another
reason for the B+ grade, rather than an
A, is that access to disclosure records
on paper could be made easier and more
affordable (copies are $.25 per page.)
The
contextual and technical usability of
Illinois’ disclosure web site
is still, along with Washington, the best
in the nation. Information about
disclosure requirements and the state’s
campaign finance law, good terminology
and thorough instructions, and overview
information to give the public a sense
of campaign finance trends, all contribute
to the number one rank in this category. There
is even a campaign finance Q&A movie
available on the site, which is an archive
of a live, call-in, streaming webcast seminar
conducted in January, 2004. That
innovative resource is primarily designed
for candidates, but also serves activists,
journalists, and others interested in following
the money in Illinois. It is still
somewhat difficult to locate the agency’s
web site from the main state homepage,
but even so, the state’s usability
testing score improved slightly.
