By Andrew Nicla | Arizona Capitol Times
The 2020 election is a year away and the state’s campaign finance websites are broken.
See The Money – a website that presents data visually – has never worked properly, and the state’s campaign-finance database has had its own set of problems since the 2018 election, and the Secretary of State’s Office is now approaching a crucial deadline. Come January, candidates from throughout the state will be filing their first financial reports for the 2020 campaign cycle and the public will want to follow the money.
See The Money was a pet project of former Secretary of State Michele Reagan, and now Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is in charge of managing and marketing it, and more immediately, trying to fix it.
“It doesn’t work, and we want it to work,” Hobbs said. Her staff has spent the past year focused on improving the reporting side, making sure the information going into the system through Beacon, the new reporting portal, works with the website’s framework and accurately displays that information in a simple and intuitive way.
Hobbs said by election time, things will change.
