Dahlstrom: Taylor shouldn’t be disqualified since most of Alaska’s candidates have questionable filings

Dunleavy administration responds to controversial decision putting former attorney general back into governor’s race by challenging filings by 91 of 121 candidates

Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom speaks at an Anchorage event on Oct. 30, 2024. (Official State of Alaska photo)

By Mark Sabbatini

Juneau Independent

It’s OK to put Treg Taylor back in the governor’s race despite a finding he violated state campaign law because the vast majority of candidates in all Alaska races this year also have questionable filings.

That response was offered by Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom during a press conference Monday focusing on her controversial decision to restore Taylor and a state legislative candidate to the ballot on Friday, reversing her disqualification of them four days earlier.

Dahlstrom and Gov. Mike Dunleavy sought to redefine the issue by declaring as suspect the information provided by 91 of 121 statewide candidates to the Alaska Public Offices Commission, citing a Department of Law review conducted during the past week. The list includes all four candidates for governor, and most of the candidates in state House and Senate races.

The review was "limited and expeditied," and it’s not yet known if any of the questioned filings are valid or a violation of Alaska’s campaign disclosure laws, said Rachel Witty, the Department of Law’s top civil attorney, during the press conference.

“This was done over the course of a day and a half," she said. "So I can’t emphasize enough that this is a preliminary review. We didn’t have time to contact candidates."

The department’s investigation was characterized by the Alaska Beacon as "unusual, if not unprecedented," since the agency "typically operates on a complaint-based system, with most actions taken when a member of the public alerts the commission to a potential problem."

Dahlstrom said many of the challenged filings may not be deliberate acts.

"It could have been a comma left out, or a number turned around, or something more," she said.

APOC recommended Taylor, a former state attorney general, not be certified as a candidate because he reported more than $1 million in rental income, but did not disclose the full names of his tenants as required by Alaska’s campaign laws. Dahlstrom said Aug. 31 she would follow that recommendation, then reversed herself in an annoucement late Friday night.

In that announcement she also reversed her disqualification of Jose Anthony Tagle, a Republican seeking the Anchorage state House seat held by Democratic incumbent Ted Eischeid. APOC recommended Tagle not be certified after he filed a blank Public Officer Disclosure Form.

When asked if a missing comma or clerical oversight should be given the same characterization as deliberately omitting a significant amount of required information, Dahlstrom said the comma reference "was a poor example on my part." She said more typical examples would be "if someone forgot their address, or if somebody forgot something that they owned, or a place that they lived, or something like that."

Dave Bronson, a Republican candidate for governor and former Anchorage mayor, questioned the nature of the Dunleavy administration’s findings in a statement Monday night.

"There is an important difference between ‘substantial non-compliance’ under AS 39.50 that was the basis for Lt. Governor Dahlstrom’s original non-certification of 2 candidates, and a technical disclosure question, accidental omission, or information put out by Department of Law that is factually incorrect," Bronson wrote in a post on his campaign’s Facebook page.

Both candidates in Juneau’s only competitive legislative race for the House District 3 seat — incumbent Democrat Andi Story and Republican challenger Annette Kreitzer — are flagged in the Department of Law’s review. The entry for Story states "Possible business affiliation with Juneau School District," while the one for Kreitzer states she "appears to have a current interest in a property located at Lot 2, Block 5, Young Subdivision, Plat 74-3, which is not dosclosed[sic] on her POFD."

Kreitzer, in an interview Tuesday, said the flagged property is her primary residence, the address of which does not have to be disclosed under the state’s campaign disclosure laws. She said she did disclose she owns the property and its ZIP code to establish it’s located in her hometown of Haines.

"I felt that I had complied with what APOC required," she said.

Story, on Tuesday, said she has no known business ties with the Juneau School District.

"To me this just seems like it's distracting everyone from the main issue, and that's the (election) division's decision to not enforce what seems to be purposeful violations of campaign disclosure laws from some of the main candidates," she said.

Unopposed House District 4 candidate Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, is not flagged in the report.

Because the administration’s press conference was held on the Labor Day holiday, APOC officials could not be reached at work for comment.

The agency has long been underfunded and short-staffed, with nine currently funded positions compared to 14 in 2014. Dunleavy said during the press conference a group of former election officials should be formed to investigate "all the laws, the regulations, the processes, the practices, the remediation, the whole list of everything involved in APOC."

"There's, I think, a strong overdue review of not just APOC — I don't want to leave people with the impression that APOC is ‘the problem,’" he said. "It's just updating everything from resources to laws to regulations to practices and so forth, so that going forward we make things better."

The Dunleavy administration has taken a number of controversial election-related actions over the past several months, including providing confidential voter data to the Trump administration, removing more than 3,000 people from voter rolls and asking them to verify their citizenship, and using unprecedented ballot tactics to distinguish U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan from Petersburg challenger Dan J. Sullivan after an attempt to disqualify the latter was rejected by the Alaska Supreme Court.

President Donald Trump, in the meantime, is seeking to restrict mail-in voting and other election-related measures to counter his frequent and unsubstantiated accusations of widespread fraud.

Dunleavy on Monday said he wants to shift the current focus to the upcoming election that will choose his replacement since he cannot run this year after serving two consecutive terms.

"We think people need to get on with campaigning," he said. "The people of Alaska need to get on with understanding what the candidates want, what they intend to do while they’re office so they can vote for them, and we just have to be able to navigate through our election system here in November."

Kreitzer, when asked about the decision to put Taylor back on the ballot, said the situation exists because of the state’s open primary that puts up to four candidates in each race to compete in a ranked choice general election.

"I think that ranked choice voting has encouraged all of this," she said.

The Anchorage Daily News, in an editorial published Saturday, criticized a candidate certification process that "can be reopened and settled behind closed doors on a Friday night, on the say-so of (Dahlstrom) alone."

"Three wrongs don’t make a right. Treg Taylor should follow the law. Dahlstrom should release the Department of Law’s review in full," notes the editorial, which was published before the review was released Monday. "APOC — not a lieutenant governor acting alone — should immediately notify the public that it is conducting an emergency review of all candidates’ filings, and that it will give each candidate five days to correct any deficiencies. After that it will recommend removal of any candidate that doesn’t follow the law. Only then can the public trust that the game is being played fairly."

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.