Treg Taylor's Old Department Got Him Back on the Ballot
APOC voted 4-1. The Lieutenant Governor said the law was not unclear. Five days later, at half past ten on a Friday night, it got even more unclear.
Hold onto the dates, because they'll do the work here.
On August 26th, the Alaska Public Offices Commission (APOC) took up questions raised about Treg Taylor's financial disclosure. On the 27th, it recommended that his candidacy for governor not be certified. On the 28th, it published the written order. The vote was 4-1, and the finding was that Taylor failed to properly disclose a significant source of income and did not correct it within the thirty-day grace period that closed July 1.
On August 31, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom announced in a press release that she would not certify his candidacy. Her words: "The law, however, is not unclear."
Then, at roughly 10:30 pm last evening, Dahlstrom threw out some alternative facts and reversed herself – restoring the candidacies of Taylor and House District 22 candidate Jose Tagle. Dahlstrom pointed to an informal review by the Department of Law that turned up supposed "numerous potential discrepancies" in disclosures across the whole candidate field.
So to recap - the Department of Law, which Treg Taylor ran for four and a half years as attorney general, interceded and saved his ass. His old shop, staffed by his old hires, produced the alleged “findings” that saved him on a holiday weekend - at an hour when normal people are headed to bed or watching Furious from the couch.
Anyway, Treg Taylor is back on the ballot along with his weirdo Lt. Governor candidate, Candice English, and Taylor’s wife – who had declared her candidacy as Lt. Governor after Treg Taylor dropped out – is no longer a candidate for anything. I think. It's all very confusing - just the way Lt. Governor Nancy Dahlstrom likes it.
Burn the Receipts
Suzanne Downing is enjoying herself. She wrote a Facebook post that tells us more than her accompanying blog post: "The latest chaos in Alaska's election system. APOC needs to be dismantled, and RCV needs to be repealed."
The Alaska Public Offices Commission exists because of Alaskans! Its roots took hold in 1974 as the Alaska Election Campaign Commission, built in the middle of Watergate by a citizen initiative effort; that same year, a second initiative put AS 39.50 on the ballot. More than sixty percent of Alaskans voted yes, and it became law in January 1975.
Candidates and campaigns report campaign contributions and expenditures to APOC. Public officials file financial disclosures with APOC. Lobbyists register with APOC. Then it all gets published where you can read it. Every donor list quoted in every Alaska political story you have ever read came from the APOC website.
It's how we know Space Karen (Elon Musk) sent $1.5 million from an address in Austin to Aurora Action Network, and that a million of it landed in the coffers of the effort to repeal Ranked Choice Voting.
MAGA has spent the last two years ripping apart every office in Washington that keeps a record. The watchdogs inside federal agencies, the ethics office that collects financial disclosures from the president on down, and the commission that keeps illegal money out of federal races. People have been fired, and agencies hollowed out. It's what MAGA does when they get power, and they do it first, before anything else, because everything else gets easier once nobody can see what's going on behind the scenes.
Now the far-right has tipped its hand, calling on the powers that be to dismantle an agency built to ensure Alaskans have fairness and transparency in their elections.
