In all the controversy about campaign contributions, one thing is clear: Mississippi needs a much better website for tracking campaign contributions. Currently, the existing Secretary of State website is crude and unsophisticated by today’s standards, lacking basic search and sorting functionality.
Currently, the website consists solely of scanned PDF pages for each individual contribution for each candidate. There is no sorting by candidate or contributors or cross referencing. For instance, there is no way to see how much a candidate received in total or how much an individual gave to each candidate. Nor can you specify time periods or compare total contributions by candidates.
Rather than scanned PDFs, candidates need to file online by inputting data into specific fields that can be sorted and categorized and cross referenced. Not only would this be easier for candidates, it would give voters a much better way to see where the money is going and who is beholden to whom.
