The long and twisting path of a right-wing effort to repeal Alaska’s open primaries and ranked-choice voting system just got a little longer.
On Friday, Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin threw out 27 signature petition booklets due to problems identified during a two-week trial earlier this month. While the disqualified booklets don’t put the effort below the total signatures needed to qualify for the November ballot, it could cause the campaign to miss another requirement to collect enough signatures in at least 30 of the state’s 40 House districts.
The Alaska Division of Elections has a deadline of Wednesday to make that determination.
It’s the latest in a long line of legal challenges that have been brought against Alaskans for Honest Elections and its associated groups over how they’ve campaigned against the state’s voter-approved election system. They faced a litany of campaign complaints that included incomplete and misleading financial disclosures as well as an apparent scheme to mask contributions through a Washington-based “church.”
In her 95-page ruling, Judge Rankin wrote that a wholesale disqualification of an initiative is an extraordinary measure typically reserved for “wide-ranging significant fraud” such as forging signatures or using bait-and-switch signature-gathering tactics. She found problems with how a handful of signature gatherers handled their booklets but didn’t find it to be concerted or widespread.
“The proffered evidence at trial of limited circulators does not demonstrate widespread and pervasive fraud similar to those cases,” she wrote. “At most, the evidence presented demonstrated limited instances of (wrongdoing) … There is no evidence in this case that there was a pervasive pattern of intentional, knowing and orchestrated misconduct.”
The 27 disqualified petition booklets include problems such as sharing booklets among multiple circulators, leaving booklets unmonitored and signing affidavits for booklets they did not circulate. She wrote that the remedy was to disqualify the specific booklets where problems had been identified rather than the entire initiative or all booklets carried by circulators.
The two-week trial featured a lot of smoke but little clear fire. The challengers’ testimony focused largely on unattended booklets, but none said they saw the booklets signed while unattended. An expert for the group noted several highly suspicious cases that he would have flagged had he been running the campaign, including a single day on which campaign head Phillip Izon collected 580 signatures.
While Judge Rankin recognized that they raised concern, she said the explanations put forward by Izon and others were credible. In the case of Izon’s 580 signature day, he explained that it was an all-day signature drive in the Mat-Su Valley that was hyped up by local conservative talk radio and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
“I’m just that good,” Izon said while on the stand.
Izon did, however, acknowledge that the campaign stumbled in many areas and that it could have been better at training signature gatherers. In her ruling, Judge Rankin recognized those shortcomings but noted that there is no legal requirement that campaigns “maintain professional levels of organization and training.”
“The remedy for failing to adequately train circulators is to run the risk of disqualification of signatures or petition booklets which are non-compliant,” she wrote, “and not to disqualify the initiative as a whole.”
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.
