State assessments are based on research of state laws, survey results from state disclosure agency staff, web site visits and online research, and web site testing by outside evaluators.

The UCLA School of Law and the Center for Governmental Studies researched state campaign finance disclosure laws. The legal research was originally completed from June 2002 through March 2003. A second comprehensive examination of all 50 states’ disclosure laws was conducted from July 2003 through July 2004, a third from August 2004 to June 2005, a fourth from March through June of 2007, and the most recent review occurred from January through June of 2008 with the purpose of identifying any changes in the state laws as of December 31, 2007. The statutes, regulations, rules, and forms of each state were evaluated. Changes in state laws that were made or implemented in 2008 are not reflected in the states’ grades, though several are mentioned in the state summaries.

The California Voter Foundation (CVF) conducted research on state electronic filing programs, accessibility to disclosure records, and online contextual and technical usability through a variety of methods. Each state agency responsible for overseeing campaign finance was asked to respond to a survey, either online, by email, phone, or fax; all 50 states completed the 2008 survey.

CVF researched campaign finance disclosure information on the web sites of each of the 50 states. To ensure uniformity in the research, the web site evaluation form first created and used in 2003 was also used in 2008, and each state web site was evaluated twice by CVF personnel from February through June 2008.

The UCLA School of Law conducted usability tests of state disclosure web sites in April 2008. The goal of the usability tests was to determine if the disclosure information provided on the Internet is accessible to the average citizen. Usability testers, recruited from the undergraduate student population at UCLA, were asked to perform specific tasks on each state’s web site. The time and number of mouse clicks it took to complete each task were measured. 

The tasks were as follows:

• Locate the state’s disclosure web site starting from the state’s homepage;
• ascertain the total contributions received by the incumbent governor in his or her last campaign (testers were given a list of incumbent governors that included the year they were last elected); and
• provide the name and amount contributed by any individual contributor to the incumbent governor’s last campaign. 

The second measure of usability was a survey in which each tester was asked to evaluate his or her experiences on each site. The states were assigned randomly to testers, with each tester testing five different states. The experiment was administered six times to ten different students, and six different students tested each state. A more detailed explanation of the usability test is included as an appendix to this report.

Following the completion of the research and usability testing, CVF compiled preliminary scores for each state that were reviewed by the Grading State Disclosure Judges before final scores, grades, and ranks were determined.