Fix this now: New York State Board of Elections’ political money monitor update needs an update
The state Board of Elections campaign finance database only goes back to 1999. Before then, the names and amounts of contributors giving money to candidates and the details on vendors getting money from politicians was confined to paper, generally sitting undisturbed in file boxes in Albany. The full disclosure was there, as required under law, if you could find it.
So there was nothing legally wrong before then when Gov. Pataki’s campaign submitting its printed contributions list in alphabetical order. By first name. In microscopic type size. Happy hunting!
Transparency improved in 1999 when the state board started requiring computerized records from all campaigns and party committees and putting them in a searchable website. The site was never as good as the one from the New York City Campaign Finance Board, which predated the state database and has always had a better system for looking and sorting and finding.
So when the state folks decided to update their disclosure reports website, it was fitting that they actually made it worse. After hearing of several complaints and being flummoxed ourselves, we got on the phone with a friendly official from the board for a run-through. The friendly official’s suggestion was to look up state Controller Tom DiNapoli’s 2022 committee. After too many steps, most of them very un-intuitive, we were guided to what we told would be a summary of DiNapoli’s committee’s statistics.
Instead of a downloaded Excel spreadsheet we got nada. We checked Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s committee and it worked perfectly well. Still on the phone with the friendly official, we tried again for DiNapoli’s report and this time the state board website replied: “CAPASFIDAS No record found”
No, that’s not Latin for unnecessary government-inflicted computer error. It’s internal state Board of Elections lingo for their Candidate Petition Administration System and their Financial Disclosure Administration System. We sent a screenshot photo to the unhappy, but still friendly official who promised to look into it.
