The campaign seeking to repeal Alaska’s open primaries, ranked-choice voting, and dark money transparency laws has been flooded with accusations that it’s running misleading disclosures in its ads to hide its billionaire backers, but the disclosures it is using show another potentially problematic link.
That’d be Anchorage businessman Kyle Bates, whose $25,000 contribution to the group has landed him in the top-three donor disclaimer on most of Repeal Now’s campaign materials. Bates was also recently in the headlines when he was among the 15 people accused by the state of Alaska of defrauding Medicaid of more than $1.8 million.
Repeal Now is the latest campaign supporting an initiative to repeal Alaska’s open primary system. The system, which is an alternative to semi-closed partisan primaries, opened the door for moderate Republicans to run and win, much to the chagrin of party hardliners. While voters rejected the repeal in 2024, this one is different because it would also repeal Alaska’s dark-money law, which voters adopted alongside the open primaries in 2020.
Those are provisions the group is currently being accused of skirting by listing its top donor as the Aurora Action Network rather than the handful of wealthy political donors — like billionaire Jeff Yass — that have given money directly to the group. Opponents argue that those provisions should require the group to list Yass and any other big-ticket donors whose money flows through it, rather than bundling it together as a faceless entity.
That’s an issue that’s currently before the Alaska Public Offices Commission, which is fielding complaints over whether the group’s disclaimers are accurate.
Whether that’s the case or not is something the commissioners will decide at a hearing in early August, but until then, Bates is currently listed as the second-highest donor in the campaign’s top-three donor disclosure thanks to a $25,000 check written on April 11, 2026.
That’s the same amount he gave to Republican gubernatorial candidate Treg Taylor, who faced his own issues with campaign finance laws.
And that’s half the size of the largest check he wrote to a business partner during the state’s investigation into $618,961.99 of alleged Medicaid fraud.
According to the court documents filed late last month by the Alaska Department of Law’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, Bates, his wife, and their business partner used Heritage Assisted Living Home LLC, Heritage Home LLC and Alaska Life Group Homes LLC to steal by billing Medicaid for senior care services that were never provided or were understaffed.
They face seven counts of medical assistance fraud, two counts of first-degree theft and a charge of scheme to defraud.
Bates landed on law enforcement’s radar because, according to the charging documents, the IRS flagged the businesses as lacking sufficient employees to meet the staffing standards for the care services — supported living and adult day services — they were billing Medicaid for. The charges describe “chaotic record keeping” that was incomplete, inaccurate or appeared to have been assembled only after investigators got involved.
In one example, the group was caught charging Medicaid for 24-hour supported living care for four individuals at a facility in Chugiak. While the level of service calls for one-on-one time, the records showed that one person was allegedly caring for all four at once.
“Each recipient was supposed to receive 8 hours of active one-on-one service each day, which cannot be accomplished with one employee when there are three other recipients in the home not being monitored or cared for,” the charges explain. “The documentation as presented claims that all four recipients were actively receiving day habilitation every 15 minutes for 24 hours, daily.”
The investigation also noted that Bates and his wife issued their business partner more than $1.7 million in checks for items like “BMW” and “x-mas” between 2019 and 2023. More than $1 million of that money came from the businesses. The purpose of those checks isn’t explained in the charging documents, but the charges note that they accounted for far more income than what they reported to the state.
Rumblings about Bates’ business practices have been percolating for years.
An anonymous post on Reddit from 2022, shortly after the IRS investigation began, identified Bates and his partner in a thread about local coffee shop fueds as “awful human beings who will literally rip off and starve the elderly in their care homes in order to squeeze every last time from them and put it into their coffee shops.”
The poster said that they believed Bates and his wife were already on the state’s radar at the time.
When the poster, who has since deleted their account, was asked if they were libeling the couple, they replied: “Libel applies only if you knowingly make false statements. What I’ve said is, to the best of my knowledge, completely true.”
Why it matters
The effort to repeal ranked-choice voting and open primaries has long been marred by accusations of wrongdoing, ranging from gross incompetence to a concerted effort to skirt the state’s campaign finance laws.
The 2024 repeal effort was famously run, in part, through a fake church, and the group turned in signature booklets that were falsely certified by a fake notary public, though the Division of Elections controversially allowed them to correct those errors. The 2024 repeal effort landed several of the people involved with hefty fines, a relatively rare penalty that reflected just how flagrant the scheme was.
And while some trouble with the state’s campaign finance reporting system isn’t unusual for campaigns, it’s becoming a trend that detractors are catching on to and working into their messaging about the campaign’s intentions.
“Why hasn’t Repeal Now refunded this contribution that appears to have been funded by fraud?” asked attorney Scott Kendall, a longtime supporter of open primaries and ranked-choice voting, who has often been involved in bringing complaints challenging the repeals.
While the latest effort has largely appealed to conservative anxiety over a system that has given rise to more moderate candidates, it also notably would do away with the dark money provisions that voters approved alongside open primaries in 2020. Those provisions, which apply specifically to groups advocating for and against voter initiatives, require more thorough disclosure of the “true source” of the money, an issue that Republicans who’ve relied on deep-pocketed Outside groups have chafed against.
Not only is this group in the middle of a fight of trying to skirt that law, but an independent expenditure campaign backing Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s 2022 election is still waging a legal battle to hide the donors behind a $3 million cash infusion.
Taken together, the issues give detractors plenty of ammunition to question the campaign. But, hey, at least it’s not calling itself Alaskans for Honest Elections this time around.
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 Bluesky.
