The Web site of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) <http://www.fec.gov> contains nearly all the information a citizen would ever want to know about what candidates for the President of the USA spend on their campaigns. Congress created the FEC, an independent regulatory agency, in 1975 to administer and enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA). This act governs the financing of federal elections, and the specific duties of the FEC include disclosing campaign finance information, enforcing the provisions of FECA, such as the limits and prohibitions on contributions to campaigns, and overseeing the public funding of Presidential elections.
To this end, this Web site provides specific information for different groups who may have different concerns with campaign finance. The FEC has created different “guides” for three categories of users: citizens, candidates and the media. The Citizen Guide to the FEC contains categories named Getting Involved, which contains information on registering to vote; campaign finance information; and how elections work. The Candidates and Committees Guide provides reporting forms and filing information, the different publications available from the FEC, as well as additional resources such as links to FEC Services, and PACYRONYMS, a list of acronyms, abbreviations, initials, and common names of federal political action committees. Finally, the Media Guide contains not only the latest news releases of the FEC, but campaign finance summary information, as well as the guide to researching public records. All three of these guides also contain a What’s New section, with links to press releases in reverse chronological order.
The site also contains information on House and Senate campaigns, the different types of voting systems utilized, as well as various statistics about past elections from 1960 to the present. Additionally, as expected, the full text of filed campaign finance reports can be found here, and they can be viewed in either HTML or PDF format within the site. All PDF documents are viewed using Adobe Acrobat, but unfortunately FEC.gov does not provide a link to the Web site providing the free download of the software.
As a whole, FEC.gov does not use a search engine, but searching is available for Campaign Finance Data. Here users can search by the name of the individual or committee making a contribution, or the candidate receiving one. An advanced search form is available for these searches, which will allow users to specify different details, such as the state an individual contributor or candidate is from, the party that a committee is affiliated with, or what type of committee has made a contribution.
Overall, the site is well laid out and intuitive to maneuver, but the design is not always uniform. The main pages of FEC.gov are bright and bold in red, white and blue. However, when users start to follow the links provided to different information, the story is not always the same. It appears that the main face of the site is a recent design, and many of the pages that are linked to it are older pages of textual information which have not been updated to reflect the more recent page style. One thing that will be found on all the pages is the FEC “seal” in the top left‐hand corner of each page. When this seal acts as a link, it returns the user to the main FEC.gov page. However, the seal is not always hyperlinked, and in these cases users are required to utilize their browser’s Back button to return to previous pages. However, when using the site as a whole, this results in only minor inconvenience.
From the main menu on the FEC home page to the easy‐to‐read site map or index, it is very easy to figure out where to get what you want within this site. The wealth of information is astounding and would definitely help any library further educate its voting patronage. I highly recommend this site for any library’s subject Web page.
