When the Maine Ethics Commission and its staff set out to overhaul the state’s campaign finance website a couple of years ago, they wanted the project to go online well in advance of the 2026 general election.
After all, this site is where candidates and political committees file reports on fundraising and spending in Maine political campaigns and where the public can access that information. The resource is particularly valuable during an election year like this one when Maine voters are choosing a new governor and Legislature.
But for much of 2026, the rollout of this new site has been hobbled by delays and lagging functionality. Ethics Commission Executive Director Jonathan Wayne told the Maine Legislature’s veterans and legal affairs committee in August that the new site was “significantly behind schedule” and said the vendor had “grossly underestimated” the time it would take to build out the foundational elements of the new system and meet the detailed requirements in the state contract worth roughly $1 million.
“Our new vendor is well-intentioned, but its promises about timing were completely
unrealistic,” Wayne told lawmakers. “Had we known it would turn out this way, we would not have gone live in January of an election year.”
Since then, Wayne has emphasized that the vendor, a nonprofit called MapLight that builds and maintains campaign finance systems for state and local governments around the country, has been working hard to add new features to the site.
Some of those newer capabilities added in recent weeks include a more robust search function and the ability to customize and directly download broad swaths of Maine campaign finance data into spreadsheets. These analytical tools can help candidates, campaigns, the media and the general public navigate a complicated maze of information to better understand how money is being raised and spent in the state’s political system.
But those tools were not available for much of the general election period or throughout the primary election.
“As sometimes happens with projects of this size and scope, finalizing the site has taken longer than originally anticipated,” MapLight President and Co-Founder Daniel Newman said in an Oct. 29 statement. “Now that it is up and running, however, the new system makes campaign finance data more easily accessible to candidates, the Commission, and the public. MapLight continually seeks to improve the systems we create and carefully reviews critiques.”
Delays, legislative action and incomplete information
The commission and its staff set out to overhaul the site after they were told that the tech vendor managing the previous version was no longer going to fully support that system. They intended to have the new site launched in 2025, Wayne said, and signed an agreement to bring MapLight on board in 2024.
When it became clear that a 2025 launch wasn’t possible for the new vendor, commission staff pivoted to a phased-in plan starting in January of this year. Wayne expected to have 95 percent of the commission’s required functionalities for the site up and running in April, he said in his August update. That would have been well in advance of the state’s June 9 primary.
As Wayne acknowledged to lawmakers, however, that did not happen.
The site did go online in January, but important features were still being added just weeks before Election Day. Wayne and MapLight now expect work on the site’s full implementation to stretch into 2027.
Several issues emerged during the implementation process this winter. One was a planned pause to convert data from the old system that the vendor projected would span less than a week — but instead lasted four weeks. That delay had a cascading effect, preventing candidates across the state from registering online during that period and ultimately requiring the Legislature to extend the deadline for candidates to qualify for state-financed Clean Election Act funding.
Newman said that extended freeze occurred because MapLight and the commission “had difficulty obtaining necessary data from one of the state’s former vendors.”
The delayed site rollout and plodding capabilities caused other complications throughout the year as well. Media organizations, including The Maine Monitor, often rely on official data from the state’s campaign finance website as the basis for their own election trackers. But with the new site in flux, members of the media, candidates, campaigns and political operatives found themselves trying to access data that wasn’t always readily available or having to sift through unwieldy and duplicative information.
Because data was not initially downloadable directly from the new site, MapLight and the commission created a different page that allowed the public to access and download a handful of campaign finance data sets. That workaround page did not give users access to nearly the same level of spreadsheet-ready data that arrived on the site in recent weeks.
Bipartisan frustration
There is bipartisan frustration about the launch among at least some members of the veterans and legal affairs committee, which has jurisdiction over matters related to the ethics commission.
“Frankly, it’s been a disaster from the start,” said Rep. Marc Malon, a Democrat from Biddeford who has been pressing the ethics commission on the website rollout.
He noted that even though the state’s previous campaign finance website “wasn’t exactly going to win any awards for aesthetics,” he thinks the new site as it stands now is clunkier and harder to navigate.
The committee’s top Republican, Rep. David Boyer of Poland, was similarly disappointed in how the transition has unfolded so far.
“It’s frustrating to take a step backward on something as important as our elections and who’s spending money on our politicians,” Boyer said in mid October. “I think there’s a real vacuum for transparency and accountability in government right now.”
Malon said that, if he’s reelected, he intends to keep pushing for fixes to the campaign finance website. He complimented Wayne and commission staff for their accessibility and helpfulness on ethics-related issues, including this one, and noted that some improvements have already been made to the site.
“Look, to their credit, they all acknowledge that it’s been a problem, which anyone can see. I think they obviously did not anticipate the problems with the new vendor that they have had,” Malon said. “But regardless, the end product has been a site that is a lot less functional, a lot more difficult to navigate, which has real implications on the public’s right to know.”
Wayne said it is common for technology vendors to run into issues that need to be addressed as a project continues. He emphasized that recent improvements to the site have gone a long way and said he believes “most people can get what they need from the system” after the continued work this fall.
Still, he said there is more work that needs to be done to improve how information is displayed.
“I’m definitely not satisfied with the timing of MapLight’s work,” Wayne said in an Oct. 22 interview. “I think it’s capable of doing very good work. But we as a client have to push to get the very best product that we can. We will get there.”
Newman said MapLight is continuing to work with the commission on improvements.
“The MapLight team has worked diligently on this project,” Newman said. “Unfortunately, we ran into unanticipated obstacles that caused delays in launching certain site functions and we understand why some lawmakers may be frustrated.”
In hindsight, Wayne said he believed it would have been better for the commission to keep the old campaign finance site live through the November election, and wait to launch the new site until issues had been resolved.
That perspective was echoed by Republican Rep. Will Tuell from East Machias.
Tuell began the year “not very amused” that he was having to learn and log into a whole new campaign finance system. But despite that initial skepticism, he said he has been pleasantly surprised by the new site.
“I’ve actually found it very easy to use to file my to enter my reporting information,” Tuell said. “It’s less complicated than it was.”
Tuell, who does not sit on the veterans and legal affairs committee, said the new site has earned a B+ in his book. But he also said he thinks it would have been better to wait to launch the site until after the election.
‘The project is still underway’
The total project implementation cost for the new campaign finance website is just over $1 million, according to Wayne. But MapLight has yet to be paid that full amount because of the work remaining.
The commission paid a total of $833,321 in three installments between April 2024 and April 2026 for MapLight’s work on the site, according to Wayne. Those payments have gone to an organization called Insight Public Sector, as MapLight is technically a subcontractor on the project.
Though the project has taken more time and work than anticipated, Wayne said the cost of the system has not gone up, and the total agreed upon price remains the same.
“Generally, the way tech contracts work is there are milestones,” Wayne said. “Payments are made periodically as certain milestones have been reached, and, because the vendor is behind schedule in delivering certain functionality, we have not paid the full contract price. At this point, there’s a lot of functionality that is yet to be delivered.”
One example of the site’s persistent shortcomings sits prominently on the homepage.
The page features a bar chart titled, “Top Candidates by Money Raised since 1/1/2026.” The chart is limited to data from 2026, even though the current election cycle and fundraising for the races featured stretch back into 2025.
Wayne and Newman said that when the site originally went live, candidates from previous election cycles were showing up in that bar chart. So MapLight changed the chart to include 2026 data only.
As a result, the homepage chart does not capture candidates’ full fundraising and spending totals for this election cycle. For example, Democratic nominee for governor Hannah Pingree is listed on the homepage as the top fundraising candidate in the state with more than $3.5 million raised and $4.2 million spent in 2026.
If you search the same site for Pingree’s individual campaign data, however, you find that her actual totals for the full 2025-26 election cycle show more than $4.9 million in total contributions received and more than $4.8 million in total expenditures.
“Why even have that feature at all if you’re not able to give the accurate picture?” Malon said about the homepage chart.
The commission chose MapLight for this work after the nonprofit had already redesigned the state’s separate lobbying disclosure site. MapLight won the lobbying site contract in 2022 through a competitive bidding process. However, MapLight did not have to bid for the campaign finance site project, which was the larger of the two. Once MapLight had created the lobbying site, and had already been through a competitive process, the ethics commission thought it made sense to use the same vendor for the new campaign finance disclosure system, Wayne said.
And he was confident that, despite the delays and hiccups, the final campaign finance website will continue to improve.
“The project is still underway and the commission will not rest until we have received an excellent product from this vendor,” Wayne said.
A nonprofit software developer
Founded in 2005, MapLight is a nonprofit based in California and has other existing government clients including the City of Denver, City of Minneapolis and the California secretary of state’s office.
MapLight’s nonprofit model allows them to focus on their government customers’ needs rather than profits, Newman said.
He declined to disclose how many people MapLight has working on the Maine campaign finance website, but he said the organization has 20 staff members and that all the work is done in house rather than being subcontracted out. He also said the software developers on his team use artificial intelligence to speed up their coding work.
“We had and continue to have adequate resources dedicated to the Maine project,” Newman said in his Oct. 29 statement.
Most of MapLight’s current revenue comes from contracts for campaign finance and lobbying reporting systems, Newman said. MapLight’s most recent tax filings indicate that nearly 80 percent of its revenue in fiscal year 2025 came from program services it provided.
The nonprofit also receives donations. Earlier in its history, that included some funding from the Open Society Foundations, a massive charitable network that gives to progressive causes and was founded by liberal billionaire George Soros.
Newman said a small percentage of MapLight’s revenue is “contributed by people who
share our commitment to ensuring the public has full, accurate information about how political
campaigns are financed” and added that it has been “many years” since his organization last received any contributions from the Open Society Foundations.
He reiterated that MapLight is a nonpartisan technology vendor serving government clients with a focus on improving campaign finance transparency.
“Software has no political affiliation,” Newman added.
Wayne said the commission staff were unaware of that past funding connection, but said it seemed like a “red herring” and stressed that the staff “have seen absolutely no favoritism or tilting or anything towards any political side” from MapLight.
Boyer and Malon were similarly unaware that the Open Society Foundations had donated to MapLight.
“I mean, it doesn’t give me warm and fuzzies,” Boyer said when told about it. “I’m not one of those ‘Soros is the reason everything is bad’ kind of people, but I am definitely skeptical of people with lots of money and power, whatever their affiliation is.”
Maine’s tech infrastructure
As work on the Maine campaign site continues this fall and winter, the ethics commission plans to marshal additional state resources by turning to the project management office within the state’s existing information technology department.
The new campaign finance site is far from the first state platform to encounter challenges during its development and implementation.
Boyer, the top Republican on the veterans and legal affairs committee, cited several other recent issues with software development at the state level, including the Maine Department of Health and Human Services’ child welfare software, called Katahdin, which received scrutiny in recent years from both the state’s child welfare services ombudsman and lawmakers on the government oversight committee.
Boyer said the next Maine governor and their administration will need to “adapt holistically” to address software technology challenges, with help from the next Legislature.
“The idea that vendors are out there charging seven figures for technology that could probably be vibe coded is concerning — especially when the end product is not as good as what could be coded for free with AI or what we had before,” Boyer said.
Vibe coding is an increasingly employed method of software development that uses AI to do the actual coding after a user sets the general instructions and parameters for what they want the code to accomplish.
Malon previously worked as a legislative and press liaison in the Maine attorney general’s office, so he’s familiar with the capabilities and shortcomings of the state’s digital platforms.
“State web systems have never been amazing,” Malon said. “Speaking as a former state employee who used to post press releases onto a state agency web page, it’s never been great. But it shouldn’t be this bad, especially in 2026.”
Source: themainemonitor.org
