The Delaware Campaign Finance Obfuscation Office

Something tells me that the leaders of state government in Delaware aren’t too interested in sharing information about their campaign contributors with the public at large. The Delaware elections website sticks a link to its campaign finance disclosure database down at the bottom corner of the page underneath a sub-menu.

A visitor is invited to browse through apparent lists of candidates, campaign committees and PACs, each organized by year, but no more than 30 results are displayed in these alphabetical lists. This means, for instance, that the last candidate one is able to find through browsing in the 2009 list is one “Boulding K W.” No Carters or Deweys for you, unless you happen to notice a little link in the upper right or a string of characters in the page’s URL reading “&Count=30″ that you can change to get a longer list.

Feel like searching for a political action committee? Go ahead, give it a shot. There’s one unlabeled entry space in an html form into which you can enter a search term. Are you searching by title, keyword, contributor, expenditure, or astral index? I have no idea. You can choose to engage in a “fuzzy search” if you like, but this term is left undefined, so the user will have to guess at its meaning.

Entering a search for “tea party,” I obtained 1 result with a non-”fuzzy” search: a 2006 document from the Independent Party of Sussex County Organization with no reference whatsoever to anything having to do with a “tea party” at all. If I allow the search to get “fuzzy,” I get 9 results. What are they? I don’t know off the bat, since as you can see from the screen capture to the right there are no names, no dates, and no descriptors whatsoever except for the only mildly-helpful “YREND,” “30DAY” and “8DAY.” A click through on each link leads to a pdf, sometimes searchable and sometimes not. Click quickly! Any visible links are temporary and won’t work after about 10 minutes. The nine results I obtained were odd, none containing any reference to anything having to do with a “tea party:”

• Mellon Bank Bi-Part PAC
• Non Partisan Citizens For Business Expansion (4 results)
• Constitution Party of Delaware (in 2007, before the blossoming of the Tea Party)
• The American Insurance Association
• The Independent Party of Delaware Sussex County Organization
• Mid-Atlantic Political Action Committee

These bizarre results are not browser-specific; I obtained them using Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox and Chrome browsers. The faults lie in the database itself.

A Delaware Tea Party does seem to exist, with hints of a connection to the murky, less-than-fully-disclosed, GOP-connected Tea Party Patriots. But I’ll be darned if I can find any record of it or its activities in the Delaware campaign finance disclosure system. That system seems designed to push people into giving up and going away.