Flaws with Utah Reporting System
Posted by Tom on October 20th, 2008I was surfing John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and he linked to an article on programming and journalism.
The article itself didn’t do anything for me, but the way John described the link connected some synapses for me. (I wish I could recover what it was—something about exposing government APIs to journalists.)
Utah does pretty well with e-government, but one thing continues to bug me: our election contributions reporting system. The key point is this: How much more powerful could it be if it exposed the data in a published RESTful XML format, suitable for use in mashups?
Untapped potential aside, I think the current system is flawed for the following reasons:
- Contributions aren’t tagged with the date their entered (only the date of the contribution). I’ve read of more than one instance where someone suspects a report was amended after the fact, but that information (if collected) isn’t exposed.
- Multiple pages of contributions/expenditures reports don’t have unique links. (e.g. each “Next” link goes to the same URL. Some magic is happening with cookies to enforce state.)
- Multiple pages of reports aren’t numbered.
- First/Next/Previous/Last links always appear, even for single page reports.
- PAC/PIC searches are broken. (Try searching for statements that “contain” some nonsense word. You’ll get the same results as if you’d searched for your own name.)
- Some expenditures are marked with asterisks, but there’s no explanation of what that means.
Let me put it this way: there are some pretty serious usability issues on the citizen side. Without having to go through the rigamarole of trying to remember the password I need only once a year (and it can only be set by contacting the Lt. Gov’s office directly—and no area code is provided when the phone number is first listed) let me just say that using the system as a candidate isn’t a walk in the park either.
Let’s be honest—it’s a simple store data/show data application. It shouldn’t be to hard to do well, if one doesn’t pick the lowest bidder. …
As an aside
For the curious, in my successful 2004 campaign, I collected $10, and spent $310.59. I still have a huge stack of plastic yard signs that I use for workspaces when I paint models and to do puzzles on.
