Although California has some of the leading laws on political disclosure, there is still work to be done regarding access and data search systems, according to findings this week from the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
The nonpartisan, nonprofit organization publicly issued a report on Jan. 11 on the topic of improving California’s political disclosure systems. A second report was also released, which looked at the rules and their actual implementation in five cities and two counties in the state, both funded by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.
The first, titled Improving Disclosure & Transparency: A Review of California's Political Disclosure System, generally found that California’s disclosure laws are “among the best in the country, but it remains difficult to access the data,” which could prevent the public from knowing just how much influence special interest groups have in local and state government, the report said.
Some areas for improvement were identified: upgrading California’s definition of “lobbyist” and “lobbying” to apply to all money spent influencing public policy; scanning and indexing paper reports for online access; providing a way to search the system according to the four main types of spending: payments to in-house lobbyists, payments to lobbying firms, activity expenses, and other influential payments; and designing a public search tool, so that the public might see who is lobbying on a bill or rule, or learn what legislation interests a particular organization.
The report also explores the pros and cons of the tools the California Secretary of State’s Office has made available online to search the public data.
“The main data storage and presentation website for California’s political spending, including contributions to state campaigns, is called Cal-Access,” the report says, calling its capabilities “rigid.” “Recently, however, the Secretary of State, in conjunction with Maplight, launched Power Search, which significantly improves the ability of users to query data about campaign contributions from the database.”
The institute also recommended that the state develop an “entity-based system, rather than compartmentalize various datasets.” This would mean the public could use a search tool to track a person or group who engages in multiple, government-based activities, such as contributing to a campaign, lobbying or other personal expenditures. Though entity-based systems are not yet common, the institute pointed out other governments that had successfully implemented the system, such as the state of New Jersey and New York City. The organization further suggested there was a need for greater access to data through the creation of API feeds and to simplify download capacity.
The second report, Best Practices for Local Campaign Finance Disclosure in California, came to much the same conclusions, but found that though California has a “threshold of $25,000 for the triggering of mandatory electronic reporting, six of the seven localities examined … maintain drastically lower thresholds.”
According to the report, only Sacramento and San Jose require all candidates to file every report electronically, and only 11 percent of San Jose reports are available on paper. “San Diego, Los Angeles City, and Los Angeles County have each instituted $10,000 thresholds,” they reported. “Thus”, the Institute wrote, “Sacramento is the only city among the seven explored for this report that enables the public to get a full picture of spending in any given election.”
“The growing public interest in campaign finance makes it essential that local governments empower citizens to hold their elected officials accountable through campaign finance data that is complete, timely, and accessible,” concluded the report.
You can read Best Practices for Local Campaign Finance Disclosure in California here, and Improving Disclosure & Transparency: A Review of California's Political Disclosure System here.
