Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill by Senator Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, on Tuesday to provide more transparent campaign finance information to voters.

The bill was developed in collaboration with the California Voter Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the election process, and supported by Common Cause, the League of Women Voters of California and the California Clean Money Campaign. SB 844 received the near unanimous support of both the Assembly and the Senate.

Sen. Fran Pavley

SB 844 requires the Secretary of State to list the amount of total contributions and the names of the top 10 donors for and against each ballot proposition online. It would also require that online voter guides include links to financial disclosure reports for candidates and ballot propositions.

“Voters have a right to know how money is spent to influence the outcome of elections,” Senator Pavley said. “This legislation makes campaign finance information more transparent and accessible to the public.”

California began posting online financial information for ballot proposition campaigns in 2000, an important step toward greater transparency. However, finding out the top contributors for or against a proposition requires gathering and re-formatting data from numerous separate financial reports. This difficult and time-consuming endeavor makes the information inaccessible to many voters.

SB 844 instructs the California Secretary of State to convert existing data into lists of top donors that can be easily accessed by all voters.

“Providing voters with convenient and timely access to top donor lists will give voters exactly the kind of straightforward information they need and, according to repeated public opinion polls, very much want,” said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation.

SB 844 complements other measures to increase voter awareness of campaign funders such as SB 27 by Senator Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana), which requires nonprofit organizations and other groups to disclose their major donors. SB 27 was signed by Governor Jerry Brown in May.