Legislator who tried to end campaign watchdog 2 weeks ago now claims he’s a big fan of APOC

On the night of April 14, Big Lake Rep. Kevin McCabe called on the House floor for the elimination of the Alaska Public Offices Commission, claiming it duplicated the work of the Federal Election Commission.

“If you will all hold your applause until I am completely done, this amendment deletes all funding from the Alaska Public Offices Commission, totaling $1.2725 million. Why you might ask? Because it’s duplicative,” said McCabe.

“Maintaining APOC is a duplicative and unnecessary use of state resources in a time when we’re scrutinizing every dollar and asking Alaskans to sacrifice especially when it comes to their PFD. We must eliminate spending wherever we can especially if it doesn’t provide a unique value or if it’s duplicative as I said this one is. The FEC is fully capable of handling campaign finance disclosures. There’s no justification for continuing to fund a separate overlapping bureaucracy at the state level,” said McCabe.

McCabe, who is a party in three cases before the APOC, was uninformed.

The Federal Election Commission has no authority to regulate state elections. It does not duplicate the work of the APOC.

The McCabe amendment to eliminate the APOC failed 11-29.

Having written about his denunciation of the campaign watchdog group, I was surprised Friday when McCabe emerged as a born-again believer in the Alaska Public Offices Commission. He didn’t say anything about his attempt to get rid of the agency.

He claimed on Facebook that one of his 10 amendments to a campaign finance bill would “Strengthen APOC—the watchdog tasked with enforcing our campaign finance laws.”

Reading McCabe’s amendments, I did not see any amendment that would strengthen the APOC.

The APOC has seven staff members and struggles to keep its doors open. It does not have the budget and the support from the Legislature it needs. Yet here was McCabe, backed up by various Republicans, trying to create more monitoring work for the APOC.

They suggested this extra work would cost the state nothing.

Rep. Dan Saddler spelled out a political fantasy that the APOC has lots of resources and that its seven employees would love to take on more chores.

“I am puzzled by the solicitious concern for APOC’s tender mercies,” Saddler said.

“This is an organization that lives for those last couple days and weeks of an election campaign. We staff them, we resource them, that is their job. They spend almost two years and we should not be afraid of burdening them with fulfilling their primary responsibility. And that is making sure we have transparent elections,” said Saddler.

Governors and lots of legislators prefer to keep the APOC as weak and ineffective as possible.

On Monday, the state House is set to vote on House Bill 16, which would update the campaign finance laws and put a $2,000 limit on individual contributions to candidates. There is no limit on campaign contributions now because of a federal court case.

HB 16 is a sensible measure. It is nearly the same as a proposed ballot initiative that will be on the 2026 ballot if the Legislature does not bring back similar campaign contribution limits.

On Friday, McCabe went on at great length with amendments to the campaign finance bill to expand it to cover so-called “independent expenditure” groups. Some of the ideas have promise, but they haven’t been examined in detail.

The GOP angst about this bill is all about ranked choice voting and the belief that Outside money needs to be limited in politics. But the anger is selective, as the Republicans are not at all upset that Outside money from the oil companies bankrolled the campaign to defeat the 2020 oil tax initiative. Or the Outside money from Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s brother.

“Every one of my amendments to try to limit dark money, and provide transparency to Alaskans via APOC rules, died along party lines. The hypocrisy of the arguments against them was ridiculous,” said McCabe.

Speaking of hypocrisy and ridiculous claims—the guy who claimed two weeks ago that APOC should be eliminated, now claims he wants to strengthen it.

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