In Alaska, a good day of collecting signatures for an initiative may net 40 to 50 signatures. The lead campaigner behind the effort to repeal Alaska’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system collected 580 in a single day.
That’d be a signature a minute for about ten hours straight, an amount that an expert for the group defending the state’s voting system told Anchorage Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin pushes the limits of believability.
“It stretches the limits of credulity,” said Jay Costa, the founder of eQual, a technology platform for citizen initiatives. “There’s just a real limit to the number of signatures one person can collect if they are, in fact, directly involved in the collection of them.”
He was testifying specifically to the signature collection efforts of Alaskans for Honest Elections’ Philip Izon, who has been at the heart of much of the controversy surrounding the effort. The group has been peppered with campaign complaints over inaccurate and incomplete financial disclosures, campaign materials that lacked paid-for-by disclosures and a “church” that was set up seemingly to mask the true source of big-ticket contributions.
A judge upheld most of those fines in a separate legal case earlier this month.
Costa said if it were up to him, he would have flagged Izon’s collection as suspicious, rejected the signatures and halted Izon’s signature-gathering efforts altogether. He said it was particularly problematic because Izon was responsible for instructing the signature gatherers, arguing that it could have trickled out to a series of problems in the rest of the signature gathering. He identified other cases where he would have done the same.
He also said there were issues with the chain of custody of petition booklets that raised questions about whether the campaign was following the rules under state law. He also noted issues around handwriting differences that, he said, suggested may show booklets were changing hands against state law, which requires the circulators to have control of the booklets and be present while they’re being signed. He also noted that it was highly unusual for circulators to be taking out multiple booklets at once, as appeared to be relatively common with the campaign.
Costa told the court that he had analyzed the signatures and booklets, flagging about 11,000 signatures that he said fall into the questionable category. If those signatures are rejected, he said, it would leave the effort short of enough signatures to reach the ballot.
The testimony capped off a week of witnesses presented by the pro-open primary group Alaskans for Better Elections, which has painted a picture of unattended signature booklets, haphazard booklet management and questionable differences in handwriting and timestamps that the challengers say should disqualify enough booklets that it should disqualify the initiative from the 2024 ballot. However, one of the big pieces missing from the testimony is evidence that any booklets were signed while unattended.
That will likely make that line of attack on the initiative a long shot.
The Alaska Supreme Court has traditionally allowed citizen initiatives to reach the ballot, erring on voter intent (which is a good thing). Much of what has been presented to the court has been suspicious, but not much of it has come across as blatantly illegal. Disgraced former Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, who represents Alaskans for Honest Elections, has routinely seized upon this point in his cross-examination of witnesses.
Shady, he said, but not technically illegal.
The testimony is set to continue today and is expected to include testimony from Izon.
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.