By Staff Reporter |
Two candidates are accusing the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission (CCEC) of issuing threats that forced a stop to their campaigns.
Risa Lombardo, the Green Party nominee for governor, and DuWayne Collier, the Green Party nominee for secretary of state, filed the lawsuit in the Maricopa County Superior Court against CCEC last week. CCEC Executive Director Tom Collins was also named in the lawsuit.
Lombardo and Collier were both qualified by Secretary of State Adrian Fontes as having enough signatures and donations to become Clean Elections candidates, meaning they were eligible to receive public funding for their campaigns.
In order to qualify as a Clean Elections candidate and receive that public funding, candidates must collect a specific number of $5 donations from individual donors and then agree to forgo other funding sources once qualified. Any candidates who receive Clean Elections funding may not withdraw from the organization.
Lombardo and Collier alleged in their lawsuit that Collins threatened them with consequences if they continued spending their Clean Elections funding, four months after they were approved for the funds.
Collins told Lombardo and Collier in separate letters that they would be required to repay the funds — $2.8 million in Lombardo’s case, and $739,000 in Collier’s case — pending the outcome of his investigation.
Collins sent the letters on the same day that the Arizona Mirror published an article outlining similar claims of fraud. The media reporting cited six individuals who were listed as donors but claimed they never donated to Lombardo, Collier, or a third candidate for governor, Scott Neely, and that the three candidates contained a significant share of donors that had no other donor history.
Collins accused Lombardo and Collier of falsifying voter identities to manufacture the $5 contributions they needed. His letters to Lombardo included references to a bank statement reflecting a nominal balance around the time she should have had thousands in qualifying contributions, and that those contributions only appeared later in a lump-sum deposit. The lump-sum deposit accusation was also raised in Collins’ letter to Collier.
Collins also told Lombardo that her secretary of state certification had been in error because of sampling requirements: Lombardo had not submitted more than 4,400 qualifying contributions, which would have been the minimum required to meet the statutory 110% qualifier for certification.
Collins advised that he would ask CCEC to initiate repayment order proceedings at their virtual meeting on August 27.
CCEC didn’t issue a repayment order, but did direct Collins to investigate Lombardo and Collier further. CCEC requested that Collins deliver his findings sometime between September 24 and their next meeting, which is not scheduled to occur until October 29 — five days before the general election.
Lombardo and Collier claim these looming threats from Collins spanning the remainder of the months leading up to the election have left them unable to continue their campaigns and therefore violated their free speech rights.
“Restrictions that burden spending for political speech, whether candidate spending or independent spending, get strict scrutiny and usually fail,” stated their lawsuit. “Defendants are trying to bully and intimidate Plaintiffs into effectively dropping their campaigns, campaigns the Commission disapproves of, by depriving them of Commission funding, or threatening to subject each to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in repayment obligations.”
Lombardo and Collier also alleged that Collins and CCEC were acting beyond their statutory authority.
They claimed that the secretary of state, not CCEC, certifies a candidate’s qualification for Clean Elections funding.
“The Commission is without power to subsequently declare, months after the Secretary of State’s certification has been completed, that a candidate should not have qualified for Clean Elections funding in the first instance and must repay their funds back to the Commission,” stated their lawsuit.
Lombardo and Collier are asking the court to enjoin CCEC from decertifying them and undertaking further actions effectively suspending their campaigns.
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