I was preparing to slog through the Secretary of State’s campaign finance system to do a search…. strike that, it has no search capabilities…. to page through the committees until I could find what I wanted… and I noticed they added an enhancement.
Apparently, you can now filter out the inactive committees.
To it’s credit, I have heard positive things about it’s back end in terms of ease of people filling out on-line forms to report. But as I detailed a while back, the front end where taxpayers can search for who is donating to whom? The important bits for the public? There’s still nothing good to report.
What should be concerning to transparency advocates is that with the new system transparency has taken a giant leap backwards when it comes to the availability and searching of donor information that was present in the preceding system. The new system has eliminated that functionality, and returned to the roots of the 2007 system, ignoring any evidence that the State of South Dakota ever dipped a toe in the waters of that kind of campaign finance transparency.
Still no wildcard searching for committees (which they had in 2007). No searching or sorting by filing date. The donor searching and cross-committee searches are gone.
If I can offer any praise, at least we don’t have to page through inactive committees anymore.
If only they’d fix the rest of it.
I thought data entry was sluggish and cumbersome. Just because the CASH system was something that had Gants fingerprints on it shouldn’t mean Krebs has to throw it out.