Mississippi lagging in digital requirement for campaign finance forms

GULFPORT -- Basic computer technology - the kind found in almost every office or classroom in America - is giving people easy access to candidates' campaign finance information in many states.

But not in Mississippi.

A nationwide, yearly study that grades states on how they inform voters about where politicians get their campaign donations gives Mississippi a fat "F" and ranks it 47th out of 50. What's more, while many other states have improved in recent years, Mississippi had a backslide, dropping from a D to an F.

Mississippi's main problem is that it does not present candidates' campaign finance information in a searchable database, says Will Barrett, an author of "Grading State Disclosure 2007." The project is a partnership between the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Center for Governmental Studies, the UCLA School of Law and the California Voter Foundation.

"Fourteen states received an overall F," Barrett said. "Mississippi got Fs in three out of four categories."

While Mississippi's disclosure law is middling, graded a C-minus, the information is not presented in a way that's easy for the public to determine who might be holding a candidate's purse strings.

But there's good news: Mississippi could greatly improve its grade overnight if it were to join the computer age in campaign finance records. Oregon recently did this, rising in the rankings from 24th to 3rd after its Legislature passed a campaign finance disclosure reform package.

The reason Mississippi's grade has fallen is that the campaign finance section of the secretary of state's Web site has become harder to use, Barrett said.

"Part of our criteria is that one of our partners, UCLA, runs a test of the usability of every state's Web site," Barrett said.

While 21 states' grades improved, Mississippi's site usability has gotten worse over the past few years, the undergrads who participated in the testing concluded. While Mississippi does provide Internet access to state candidates' finances, it provides them in a portable-document format, or pdf, which means the files are only pictures of documents. Candidates are required to turn in paper forms, sometimes handwritten, and not computer spreadsheets.

A voter or reporter cannot search the records by computer, or have a computer compile tallies of various donors, expenditures or categories. Because campaign-finance reports for major state races, such as governor or lieutenant governor, can contain hundreds of pages of donor listings per candidate, using the data to determine who, or what industry, is financing a candidate is time-consuming and difficult.