I had a legislative candidate point out to me last night that the SOS’s website is a mess when it comes to searching candidate financial reports. No surprise, the state isn’t big on functionality with their websites. I had an IT person look at it and give me their 2-Cents:
So much for Powers being an expert web designer. We call this an eye candy site. It will blind you with glitz and no function. Lots of blinking, 1990’s moving lists to nowhere, unlabeled icons, text headers not linking to anything and no ergonomics.  Wow what a mess. Two things come directly to mind as I look:
1.       Sdsos.gov/elections/default.aspx is the elections page.
a.       The scrolling ‘2012 Candidate Filings’ box is not in any sort order, is annoying and does not link to anything useful.
b.      Links on the page are to ‘stuff’ with no explanations leaving you to guess what they are presenting.
2.       C.A.S.H. System <https://sdsos.gov/campaignfinance/default.aspx> was found to be the campaign / reporting link.
a.       Web standards for access links are not used, you have to figure out how to find the link to get to process you are looking for.
b.      Donation Search, try putting in a district number, such as 10. The list of districts displays up, not down. This may seem minor but it does not make the search process very ergonomic.
c.       Did a search for all donations in District 10, the presentation is not smooth and as you continue to use the system you get fewer results until you realize the ‘Clear’ search button must be clicked between searches to clear fields.
d.      Bouncing between fields is cumbersome
e.      Try screen scraping results with your mouse to highlight, it will not collect all data.
I guess they are ‘working on it’. Rumor has it they are manually typing in the paper filings instead of scanning them. That leaves room for inaccuracy. The biggest problem with this site is that NOT all of the filings are up yet.
Look at Minnesota’s site, very searchable.
We are only a few days away from the primaries and not all of the reports are up yet. This is unfortunate.