Ranked-choice voting opponents fight campaign finance fines at Alaska high court

(CN) — Alaska Supreme Court justices pressed attorneys Wednesday on whether state campaign finance laws were violated when an Anchorage businessman funneled $90,000 through a church to fund efforts to repeal ranked-choice voting.

The oral arguments in two related appeals centered on penalties totaling $94,000 imposed by the Alaska Public Offices Commission against Arthur Mathias, the Ranked Choice Education Association and other opponents of the state’s voting system.

At the heart of the dispute is whether a penalty law adopted as part of the 2020 Ballot Measure 2 applies only to candidate elections or extends to ballot measure campaigns.

That 2020 initiative, which narrowly passed with 50.55% of the vote, replaced partisan primaries with open top-four primaries and established ranked-choice voting for general elections. It also included new campaign finance disclosure requirements, including rules about revealing the “true source” of political contributions.

Former Alaska attorney general Kevin Clarkson, who now represents the penalized groups, argued that regulators misapplied the law.

“APOC is not entitled to rewrite statutes,” Clarkson told the five-justice panel of the commission. “They’re bound to apply and enforce the statutes as they’re written.”

Clarkson said that the penalty provision specifically limits its application to “true source reporting failures” in candidate elections. The statute references two other sections — both of which, he argued, apply exclusively to candidate races, not ballot initiatives.

But Kimberly Rodgers, representing the commission, pushed back against that interpretation. She argued that the prohibition against contributing “in the name of another” has long been understood as a true source rule that applies to all elections, not just candidate contests.

“The public has a right to know the sources of funding supporting or opposing a ballot measure,” Rodgers said, adding later that “When someone gives in another person’s name in violation of .074(b), they have necessarily misreported or failed to disclose the true source of a contribution.”

Justice Dario Borghesan was skeptical, questioning whether the statute’s language supported the commission’s interpretation. He noted that while one sentence of the law explicitly uses the term “true source,” the earlier sentence — which the penalty is based on — does not.

“We’re trying to understand which parts of the statute go with one another,” Borghesan said. “And it simply doesn’t use the language of true source.”

Mathias made a December 2022 contribution of $90,000 to the Ranked Choice Education Association, which was established as a church in Washington state. The association subsequently contributed to Alaskans for Honest Elections, which led the failed 2024 effort to repeal ranked-choice voting.

The commission concluded that Mathias had violated the law by contributing in the name of another person or group to obscure the true source of funding.

Clarkson disputed that Mathias was even the source of the money the association gave to the ballot group, pointing to bank records showing that another donor had contributed $250,000 to the association before Mathias’ donation. He argued that the commission violated its own rules by attributing the contributions to Mathias without a “uniform methodology.”

Borghesan pressed Clarkson on Mathias’ public statement at a February 2023 campaign kickoff event where he said he had contributed $100,000 to the cause.

“He’s the one on the RCA board who cuts the check in the similar amount. Whether they’re the same dollar bills or not, it certainly has the flavor of,” Borghesan said before being cut off by Clarkson.

“Simply writing a check doesn’t mean you know whose money is coming out of that account,” Clarkson said.

The case also involves a cross-appeal by Alaskans for Better Elections, the pro-ranked choice group represented by Scott Kendall and Samuel Gottstein. They argued that the commission erred by not imposing triple damages as required when violations are found to be intentional.

“Once APOC finds that misconduct was intentional, the maximum penalty must be set to three times the amount of the contribution,” Gottstein said.

Superior Court Judge Laura Hartz largely upheld the commission’s findings in July 2024, though she remanded one issue involving $2,358 in cash contributions back for reconsideration. Both sides appealed different aspects of her decision.

The constitutional implications also loomed large. Clarkson referenced a 2023 Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Wyoming Gun Owners v. Gray , which found that Wyoming’s donor disclosure requirements for political communications violated the First Amendment because they were not narrowly tailored and forced small advocacy groups to “overdisclose” their supporters.

Justice Aimee Oravec questioned whether contributors to nonprofits could unexpectedly find themselves associated with ballot measures they never intended to support, describing a hypothetical of a dog person donating to a cat nonprofit.

“I keep thinking back to that poor dog person that’s going to be outed as a cat person,” Oravec said.

Rodgers said that the Ranked Choice Education Association was fundamentally different from a general-purpose nonprofit, using the American Cancer Society as an example.

“Its very existence centered around this initiative proposal,” she said. “Its donors could not have been unaware that its mission was trying to repeal ranked choice voting.”

The five-justice panel, which also includes Justices Jennifer Henderson, Jude Pate and Chief Justice Susan Carney, gave no indication when they would rule.

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