The Alaska Public Offices Commission was supposed to issue its decision on a series of complaints challenging efforts to oppose and repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system on Sunday, but instead, it pushed the decision off until early next year.
Citing “unusual circumstances,” the Commission has given itself until Jan. 5, 2024, to decide on three complaints it heard at a Nov. 16 meeting. The headlining complaint accuses the group behind the voter initiative to repeal Alaska’s voter-approved election system, Alaskans for Honest Elections, of intentionally concealing its financial backers and other campaign activities from the public.
“The primary reason for this extension is the large volume of material and the complexity of the matters heard at the meeting. Secondary reasons include intervening holidays and office closures due to weather and resulting building damage at the Department of Law,” explains an order that was issued on Monday and first reported by the Anchorage Daily News.
Alaskans for Honest Elections and its two key organizers, Art Mathias and Phillip Izon, are accused of violating a litany of campaign finance laws, including failures to register and report their campaign activities. The most serious allegation contends that Mathias illegally filtered $90,000 of funding through a Washington-based church.
At the hearing, disgraced former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson argued that penalizing the group for funneling contributions through a church — the Ranked Choice Education Association — would violate the group’s First Amendment rights and vowed an appeal to the court system.
Alaskans for Better Elections, the group that backs the voting system and brought the complaints, disputes the argument and contends the initiative campaign has continued to flout state campaign disclosure laws despite repeated warnings. APOC staff investigators generally agreed with the Alaskans for Better Elections, finding that the campaign violated a litany of state disclosure laws and recommended stiff penalties against the group and its key members.
The timing of the delay, however, raised alarms for Scott Kendall, the attorney handling the complaint for Alaskans for Better Elections. He told the Daily News that it essentially allows the group to continue through the final stretch of the signature-gathering process for its initiative without meaningfully addressing its wrongdoing.
“If I was a paranoid conspiracy theorist, I’d think to myself, ‘Oh, so (Attorney General) Treg Taylor wants to give these guys a break until they have to have their signatures in,’” Kendall told the paper. “It’s very strange. It violates their statutes, but also they’re the ones in charge of their statutes.”
The APOC commissioners also heard two other complaints at its November hearing. That includes a complaint against a group affiliated with former U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka, which is also opposed to ranked-choice voting, and an unrelated case dealing with a sitting legislator’s financial disclosures.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.