An anti-ranked choice voting group may have violated campaign finance rules

A complaint filed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission in early July accuses the backers of an effort to repeal the state’s ranked choice voting system of violating campaign finance laws.

According to the complaint filed by Alaskans for Better Elections, a nonpartisan voter education nonprofit, three groups collecting signatures to repeal Alaska’s nascent ranked choice voting system improperly registered with the APOC.

Those three groups — Alaskans for Honest Government, Alaskans for Honest Elections, and the Ranked Choice Education Association — appear to have misrepresented themselves in their registration by incorrectly identifying the nature of their organization, and neither of them have reported any of their donors or expenditures, as required by law. The RCEA was founded and registered as a church and “engages in unreported campaign activities and what appears to be the laundering of contributions to AHE,” according to the complaint.

In 2020, Alaskan voters approved a ballot measure adopting a ranked choice voting system, allowing voters to rank their choices instead of only choosing one candidate. If a single candidate is the first-choice on 50% or more ballots, they win the election. If not, the candidate in the last position is eliminated and the ballots are re-tabulated; the process repeats until a candidate wins.

The ranked choice voting system debuted in Alaska in August 2022 in a special election to fill late Republican Congressman Rep. Don Young‘s seat. Democrat Mary Peltola defeated her two opponents, former governor Sarah Palin and former congressman Nick Begich. Maine is the only other state to use a ranked choice voting system for federal and presidential elections. 

The voting method faces increasing opposition in Alaska; the groups named in the complaint are attempting to gain enough signatures to once again ask Alaskan voters to decide in next year’s elections whether they want ranked choice voting. Arkansas’s Republican Senator Tom Cotton called it a “scam to rig elections” after Republicans lost the seat in 2022. A number of red states passed bills to formally ban ranked choice voting in 2022 and 2023, including Tennessee, Florida, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota.

The effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked choice voting system appears to originate from a Christian organization called Wellspring Ministries. The complaint filed by ABE says that the RCEA “appears to have been formed as an ‘auxiliary’ of Wellspring,” so that donors can use the church’s IRS status to get a tax break for donations.  

The complaint names two men in leadership roles of the RCEA, AHG, and AHE — Phillip Izon and Art Mathias. Izon is the chair and records keeper for AHG and a member of the founding board of directors for the RCEA.

The complaint alleges that Mathias, involved with RCEA, AHE, and Wellspring, “appears to have used the RCEA as a pass-through entity to obscure his contribution of personal funds to AHE and may be using the RCEA to hide the identities of other unknown donors.” The complaint also says that Mathias might be using the RCEA, which is registered as a church, “as a vehicle to falsely obtain tax deductions for these political contributions.”

In response to the accusations, Mathias told the Anchorage Daily News that the complaint filed by ABE is “just politics and lies” and says that he’s been in touch with APOC to help address the concerns and resolve the issues.

The complaint also alleges a false contribution from Izon to the AHE “intended to inflate” the groups financial situation, which if true, is a violation of Alaskan law. In the first quarter of 2023, AHE reported $200,000 of in kind contributions — meaning a non-monetary contribution — from Izon for “management costs/time” for the first two weeks of the group’s formation. “The fantastical assertion that Mr. Izon’s time is worth $100,000 per week is absurd on its face,” the complaint says. 

“Whether by design or through sheer incompetence, the scope and scale of Respondents’ violations are staggering, and has kept the public from knowing who is financing this confederation of opponents of Ballot Measure 2,” the complaint says.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.