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The State of Disclosure in Alabama
Alabama received its fourth consecutive F
and ranked 49th overall in Grading State Disclosure
2007, dropping 15 places in the Online Contextual
and Technical Usability category rankings.
Alabama’s disclosure law ranked 48th
overall in 2007. Alabama failed again to strengthen
its campaign disclosure law, despite bills
introduced in 2007’s contentious regular
legislative session to enact electronic filing
and to ban transfers between political action
committees. Contributing to the consistently
low rank in the law category are a lack of
mandatory auditing of campaign statements and
a lack of independent expenditure reporting.
The law does require the disclosure of the
names and addresses of contributors, but candidates
are not required to disclose a contributor’s
occupation or employer, the campaign’s
itemized debts or expenditures made by subvendors.
Very
little has changed on Alabama’s
disclosure web site since the 2005 assessment,
and the problems outlined in previous Grading
State Disclosure reports still exist. To improve
access to online campaign finance reports,
the agency might start by streamlining the
process for viewing scanned PDF images of reports,
and shortening the number of steps required
to get to the various schedules of each report.
For example, prior to viewing requested data,
a screen appears stating, “The document
you requested…has 31 pages… size
is 1310K. Click the link below and the document
will open in approximately 15 seconds.” This
extra step could likely be removed as most
files take just 1-2 seconds to open.
Continuing
the decline from a relatively high Online
Contextual and Technical Usability grade
in 2004, Alabama received an F in 2007 and
ranked 40th in this category. Driven lower
by poorer performance in the usability testing,
Alabama’s disclosure site also lacks
a number of contextual features that make disclosure
sites more user-friendly. For example, specific
dates covered by reports are not listed, overviews
comparing candidates’ financial activities
are not available, and amended reports are
labeled as “Other”, rather than “Amended” reports.
While the Secretary of State’s site does
offer helpful instructions, greater contextual
usability could be achieved with the addition
of a detailed description of which candidates’ reports
are available for viewing online.
→ Quick
Fix: Provide the reporting period’s
start and end dates within the index
of a candidate’s reports.
♦ Editor’s
Pick: Clear
and prominent “View
Campaign Finance Reports” link
on the Secretary of State’s homepage. View
image
 Disclosure Agency: Secretary of State
Disclosure Web Site: http://www.sos.state.al.us
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