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The State of Disclosure in Alabama
Alabama
has received an F in each of the five Grading
State Disclosure assessments conducted since
2003, and ranked 49th in 2008. Despite the
state’s overall failing performance,
Alabama earned a passing grade in the Online
Contextual and Technical Usability category
due in part to the Secretary of State’s
office debuting a more user-friendly homepage
in late 2007.
Alabama
earned an F again and dropped one spot to
49th in the disclosure law rankings since
2007. Alabama law requires campaigns to disclose
the name and address of contributors and
the recipient, date and reason for campaign
expenditures, but subvendor expenses are not
reported. The state also suffers from poor
enforcement provisions and debt reporting requirements.
Unfortunately, the Alabama legislature failed
to act on a number of opportunities to strengthen
campaign laws, and none of the bills introduced
in 2008 dealing with disclosure issues became
law, leaving the state with no independent
expenditure reporting, no disclosure of contributor
occupation or expenditure data, and no program
for the electronic filing of campaign disclosure
reports.
Although
the Secretary of State’s web
site was redesigned since the last assessment,
the effort did not include a redesign of the
system for accessing campaign disclosure records
and Alabama earned an F again in 2008 in the
Disclosure Content Accessibility category.
The Secretary of State’s staff data-enters
the total amounts raised and spent within individual
reports but, as noted in previous assessments,
the process for viewing itemized data is cumbersome
and limited to browsing scanned PDF copies
of campaign disclosure filings. While disclosure
documents are posted to the Internet quickly,
the lack of online, searchable databases of
campaign finances and the inability to sort
or download the data are significant weaknesses
of the site. The public can purchase paper
copies of disclosure reports from the Secretary
of State’s office for $1.00 per page,
the highest fee for copies charged by any state
(South Dakota also charges $1.00).
The
Secretary of State’s web site redesign
did help Alabama earn a better rating on the
2008 usability test and a D- in the usability
category after failing in this area in 2007.
Testers were able to complete their tasks more
quickly this year, but the site is still lacking
in terms of contextual information. The site
could be enhanced by improving the description
of the disclosure data available online, providing
the public with the ability to compare the
summary information between different candidates
or election cycles, and by listing the starting
and ending dates covered by each reporting
period.
→ Quick
Fix: Label amended reports as “Amended” rather
than “Other”, the current
label used.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: The
Secretary of State’s newly designed
homepage features a prominent link to “View Campaign
Finance Reports”. View
image
 Disclosure Agency: Secretary of State
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.sos.state.al.us
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