New Michigan transparency portal a work in progress, leaving some disclosures hard to find
- The state rolled out a new portal for viewing campaign finance and lobbying disclosures
- Officials told Bridge the system is still a work in progress
- Government watchdogs say the system needs changes to avoid being a step backward
A multimillion-dollar update to Michigan's transparency portals is still a work in progress after the Michigan Department of State rolled out the new software this month.
Used to provide the public with information about Michigan’s campaign finance, lobbying reports and personal financial disclosures of politicians, the new Michigan Transparency Network portal provides less information to the public in its current form than the old system.
In a statement, the Michigan Department of State said what has been released represents the “base functionality” of the system and characterized it as a work in progress. They said they were aware of issues with the system they hoped to correct “as soon as possible.”
Lobbyist registrations no longer list their clients, their expenses can’t be easily viewed, and the only means of downloading state campaign finance data en masse appears broken.
“Additional features will be added in coming weeks, including planned upgrades to the public search function,” Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s spokesperson, Sam May, told Bridge in a statement. “These features will be prioritized with input from filers and other users across the system.”
The state contracted in May 2023 with a private vendor, Tyler Technologies, to build a new system, paying the contractor more than $9.3 million over a five-year period as they update thestate’s outdated systems.
One of the contract deliverables calls on Tyler Technologies to “improve public display and search of data,” and the newly updated portals do offer the public a sleek new interface. But, at least for now, the new system also reduced the amount of information accessible to the public relative to the old system, making it tougher for activists and government watchdogs to gather information about their elected officials.
“While we provide the technology solution, our clients own the data,” Tyler Technologies communications manager Jennifer Kepler said in a statement and directed questions to the state.
Candidates and campaigners had long bemoaned the old software used to file campaign finance reports, which was criticized as clunky and unintuitive. The new software is an attempt to ease the process while integrating lobbying disclosures, campaign finance and new personal financial disclosures.
State Sen. Jeremy Moss, D-Southfield, who chairs the Senate’s Elections and Ethics Committee, defended the department.
“When you bring new technology to any system, whether it's in public or private industry, there are growing pains,” he said in an interview, calling it “a learning opportunity to make this thing more accessible.”
He said he was confident the department would work to improve the portal in the near future.
Identifying donors and recipients in campaign finance records can be particularly tricky because the state’s data itself is messy — committees and their donors aren’t matched to one another, even if both are registered in the state’s system.
“Street” can be spelled “St.” and abbreviations abound, especially for longer names. For instance, over the last 25 years, the Michigan Beer and Wine Wholesalers State PAC — one of the most prolific, albeit not the largest, donors in state politics — has been spelled in candidates’ filings at least 225 different ways, from “MI BR & WN WHLSLRS ASSN PAC” to “MICH BEER/WINE WHS. PAC”. The names of elected officials are also regularly spelled incorrectly, even by the lobbyists paying for their meals.
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It makes the data in bulk all that much more valuable, because it allows researchers and journalists to create more accurate totals by cleaning and grouping inaccurate disclosures.
State officials told Bridge mass downloads are still available from the portal’s contribution analysis page, but, when three members of the Bridge staff attempted downloads on Friday, nothing happened.
Without mass downloads of campaign finance data, it’s “taking away your opportunity for people to see the whole picture,” said Brendan Glavin, research director at the transparency nonprofit OpenSecrets.
Large quantities of campaign finance data have been regularly used in Bridge reporting, including a recent investigation that found the vast majority of the money raised by Michigan House candidates in 2024 came from outside their legislative districts.
State Rep. Bill Schuette, R-Midland, who had previously pushed for transparency legislation in the House, took the opportunity to critique Benson’s leadership. Benson is a current candidate for governor.
“You'd hope they'd be able to do it for less than $10 million and you'd be able to use it,” Schuette said. “Frankly I’m not sure how we could do worse.”
Lobbying information has also become more obfuscated. Previously, when looking up a lobbyist or lobbying organization, the public could view both employees and employers. Now, the site only displays employees, something May called a “known issue” and said the department was working to correct.
It effectively blocks members of the public from learning who a lobbyist or lobbying firm represents.
Similarly, when searching for the money spent by lobbyists on an elected official, the search results only reveal the names of lobbyists, requiring the public to manually sift through sometimes hundreds of transactions to find the individual expense.
In 2021, OpenSecrets ranked the transparency of state lobbying information online and gave Michigan a relatively good score of 15.75 out of 20. Glavin said Michigan provides more information than some other states, but, without substantial changes to the new portal, Michigan “would fall significantly down the line.”
The Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on tracking money in Michigan politics, warned against restricting access to readily available disclosures.
“Ending open campaign finance and lobbying data access will force the public to use difficult and costly FOIA requests, which have their own limitations in Michigan,” said Neil Thanedar, the organization’s executive director. “MDOS should reverse these changes and make it as easy as possible to download and analyze government transparency data.”
In the meantime, the state’s prior portals have been rendered inaccessible, greeting visitors with a login prompt.
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