Dahlstrom's election debacle
Former Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor, an off-again on-again candidate for governor, has a pronoun problem.
Upon learning that he is back on the ballot, Taylor complained that “they” kicked him off the ballot and “they” treated him unfairly.
“This campaign has always been about standing up to political insiders and special interests who think they get to decide what’s best for Alaska. Then they tried to take me off the ballot,” Taylor said on Facebook.
“They realized that if they applied the same standard they used against me, they’d have to remove multiple candidates from the ballot, throwing our election into chaos. So they put me back on.”
“They” did not take Taylor off the ballot. And they did not put him back.
Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom did all that.
I could write more about this fiasco and how Kelly Tshibaka is claiming credit for Taylor’s resurrection, but I could not do a better job than the Anchorage Daily News, which posted an excellent editorial on this Saturday.
The Daily News said that “Alaska’s certification process under the leadership of Nancy Dahlstrom is a joke. Apparently, it can be reopened and settled behind closed doors on a Friday night, on the say-so of her alone.”
Here is the Alaska Beacon coverage, while here is what the Anchorage Daily News reported.
Dahlstrom wrote to Taylor that she has just now discovered that he is not the only one who has not filled out his financial disclosure form correctly. She has been kicking around state government a long time to be that willfully blind.
This institutional failure is a disgrace. The lieutenant governor as well as the acting attorney general, Cori Mills, and the shadow attorney general are all culpable. There is also room to blame the governor and the Legislature for failing to provide the APOC with the resources it needs to perform its long list of assigned tasks required by law.
I disagree with the ADN editorial on one point. It calls on the APOC to “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.”
I think that the APOC can surely spot the obvious problems, such as Bernadette Wilson failing to mention the business she owns, but it cannot audit every financial disclosure statement for every candidate in rapid fashion.
The APOC has nine budgeted positions, eight of which are filled.
It is one of the smallest agencies in state government, with a budget of about $1.3 million.
It doesn’t have the staff to keep up with all of the campaign disclosure questions, let alone the intricacies of the financial disclosure reports required of every candidate.
Almost every governor, including Dunleavy, and almost every edition of the Legislature has been more than happy to have the APOC functioning at a subpar level. They always want to keep the APOC so deficient in resources that it is never in a position to investigate all that needs investigating.
Then they have the gall to complain about the APOC failure to investigate this and that.
No one in state politics should be surprised to hear that the agency can’t do everything it is supposed to do.
The staff includes an executive director, a programmer, three paralegals, a campaign disclosure coordinator, a campaign disclosure associate and a law office assistant.
“We are still struggling to catch up on the backlog of complaints but are making steady progress but likely won’t be able to bring everything current until 2027,” Executive Director Heather Hebdon said in this budget review this spring.
Time after time the APOC has told legislators and governors that it does not have the ability to be proactive and to check every campaign and political document that is mandated by law.
Governors and legislators have ignored this problem for decades. Now some will claim that because the APOC didn’t accomplish all that it should have, the agency should be eliminated.
What we need is a stronger APOC with the staff it needs to do its job.
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