A judge has denied election attorney Scott Kendall and his Alaskans for Better Elections group in their efforts to disqualify the repeal of ranked-choice voting from the November ballot by lawfaring the petition booklets submitted to the Division of Elections.
The decision, granted on Friday, ended up in favor of the group that worked to collect tens of thousands of signatures over the course of a year.
Alaskans for Better Elections deployed paid spies to check on the people who were circulating the repeal petitions, to make sure they were not violating statute or regulations that govern petitions. The Alaskans for Better Elections group, with a trio of plaintiffs, challenged dozens of petition booklets and produced videos showing that sometimes the booklets were left unattended, which would be a violation of regulations governing initiative petitions.
But in the end, only a couple of dozen petition books were disqualified by the judge, and enough remained to exceed the minimum required to ask voters if they really want to stick with open primaries and ranked-choice general elections — the type of voting method ushered in by 2020’s Ballot Measure 2, a product of Outside dark money playing in Alaska’s election system.
One claim made by Alaskans for Better Elections is that one of the persons who notarized over 60 booklets had allowed her notary seal to expire. The Division of Elections had decided that this was the kind of error that the petitioners — Alaskans for Honest Elections — could fix. Alaskans for Better Elections objected to the Honest Elections group being able to repair that problem.
In another example, the plaintiffs said there was no way a person could collect over 500 signatures in one day. That was ruled unfounded because Alaskans for Honest Elections was able to show video of the busy venues they went to, including the Alaska State Fair and an event at the Palmer Train Depot, where former Gov. Sarah Palin was the star attraction.
Another example was when business owners who were in charge of petition booklets left them unattended while they left the room. Some of the instances of unattended booklets were caught on video or in photographs by the paid spies of Alaskans for Better Elections; some of those spies embedded themselves into the Alaskans for Honest Elections volunteer group to build the case and the Honest Elections activists had no idea at the time that there were double agents.
Attorney Kendall bought an expert witness from California who advises people on initiative packages before they are filed. That man told the judge that many of the petition booklets were very suspicious. He said that he found one incident where a petition book sponsor had three books going at one time.
But, during deposition he was asked if that is against the law. It is not. The man’s accusations, like this one, fell apart one at a time.
The judge ended up throwing out 27 booklets for various reasons, but in the end, over 34,500 signatures in 33 House districts were acceptable to the judge — more than enough to qualify for November’s ballot.