The fledgling transparency movement is quickly moving from childhood to adolescence. The sobering developments around the economy, economic stimulus spending, and corresponding accountability efforts have elevated the public’s desire for more digital information and spurred organizations to develop evidence-based visual analyses. As the federal government ramps up Recovery.gov, designed to track stimulus spending, the transparency movement will mature further. But the infrastructure of democracy will increase in efficiency only if and when the collective political will catches up with the potential of technology.
Defining “a lack of political will” is difficult. But it is easy to recognize when you experience it. Perhaps the best example of a lack of political will for transparency is at the federal level, where the U.S. Senate refuses to move its campaign finance disclosure to an electronic format—despite the millions spent on sophisticated campaigns. At the state level, it manifests in different and often subtler ways. Missouri disclosure officials insist that the jumbled, undelimited electronic data they provide in a single field is the best they can offer. That strains credulity. When, years ago, Utah’s new campaign finance website went offline for the duration of the legislative session, that, too, strained credulity.
More commonly, disclosure agencies and staff members get caught in the “two bosses” trap, where they must pay attention to the desires of elected lawmakers who control the agency’s budget, and the public, which is genuinely hungry for information about political donors, lobbyists, and their relationships to legislation and contracts. Montana is a good example of this. During the tenure of at least four political practices commissioners, the campaign disclosure agency has hired vendors to help implement an online filing and disclosure system, purchased several software packages, and input donor data and campaign expenditures in different formats and programs. Now, more than seven years later, electronic disclosure in Montana has improved to include PDF images of contribution and expenditure reports online, but still no database.
South Carolina has long been judged one of the most fragmented and unavailable states for public disclosure of campaign finances. Statewide candidates and political party committees filed reports with the State Ethics Commission, Senate candidates with the Senate Ethics Committee, and House candidates with the House Ethics Committee. None of this information was available online for viewing. It was available to the public only after the Institute obtained paper copies of filed reports and manually input the data to its online database. In 2003, South Carolina legislators passed legislation requiring online filing of campaign finance reports. Sounds good, right? Nothing changed—due to a failure to include any funding to develop an electronic filing system. In 2006, statewide candidates were supposed to begin filing online reports; the first reports for these candidates were not filed until January 15, 2008, even though none of those candidates were up for office again until 2010. In April 2008, some Senate and House candidates began filing their reports online. However, large campaign war chests raised during 2007 for these elections are not disclosed on the state website. It remains to be seen how the online filing actually works during the 2010 election cycle, but the current data is not easily searchable and it can be downloaded in only bits and pieces from individual pages of each report. While this would be a marked improvement over the previous processes, it underscores the type of foot-dragging encountered on the long and tortuous trail toward real transparency in South Carolina state politics.
Connecticut is another example. It has had an electronic reporting system for campaign contributions for a few years. However, at first the online data was not downloadable and the private contractor operating this database quoted the Institute a price of $10,000 for each download of data. Therefore, Institute staff members had to print the reports, then input, audit, standardize, and upload this data to provide free public access. With a change in administrations in 2006, the state began implementing a new electronic filing system. However, current election-cycle reports are not searchable or downloadable during the cycle; one is only able to view individual reports in PDF format. To provide a transparent, searchable database, the Institute still must print individual reports, then input, audit, standardize, and upload the data.
Arkansas makes available online images of candidate and political party committee reports. But when it comes to reporting donors to ballot measures, the reports are sporadically posted for select ballot measure committees. In fact, the online listing of the registered committees—needed to expedite requests to the state for reports—is incomplete, so the public has no way of knowing if a committee was formed officially or if it filed reports.
Many states that do offer electronic filing, and databases for download or purchase, do not provide complete information in their databases. For example, Texas, New Jersey, Colorado, Iowa, and California do not require all candidates to file electronically, so the Institute must manually enter paper reports into a searchable database. Other states, such as Indiana, Kentucky, Colorado, and Michigan, do not include data for small contributions reported as lump sums, loans, and returned contributions in their electronic data—again requiring manually input data to complete the stories.
While Missouri has an online searchable database, the contributor data provided to anyone ordering a copy of the data is sent all in one field. Parsing the contributor data into separate fields to make the data useful is a more egregious task than reentering all the data from scratch from printed copies of the reports.
Finally, as the public begins to look at and download data from disclosure agencies, they must keep a critical eye out for clues about the completeness of the data. In Utah, the Institute has requested electronic data time and again, only to find on closer inspection that large chunks of the database are missing. Successive requests have resulted in no satisfaction, so the Institute simply prints off the paper reports and enters the data manually.
California offers yet a different example of issues facing public disclosure in the states. While it probably has the most complete and easily searchable database of campaign contributions at the state level, the system is in peril of crashing due to its aging information and hardware architecture. When coupled with ongoing budget shortfalls that preclude spending funds to revamp this massive database, one major glitch could cause the whole system to become ineffective.