There is something fishy going on with the consent decree that Representative Louise Stutes signed with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. After admitting to numerous campaign finance violations, she now appears to be trying to conceal information she was required to disclose. Even worse, it looks like the APOC is helping her do so. There are two issues with this mess that the voters should be concerned about.

The first concern is the appearance of APOC bias in favor of Stutes. In Finding Number 2 of the consent decree, Stutes agreed to reveal the names of anonymous donors who contributed to her 2022 reelection campaign, and to do so within ten days. The full APOC commission reviewed and approved the consent decree in a hearing on August 3^rd, meaning Stutes should have had until August 13^th to turn over the donors’ names. However, in what appears to be an intentional move to help Stutes, APOC staff did not release the consent decree approval order on August 3^rd, but sat on it for one additional unexplained week. They only released the final order on August 11^th, which started the clock on Stutes’ ten-day time period.

The result of this suspicious extra week is that Stutes won’t have to reveal the names of her mystery donors until after the primary election. This gives the appearance that the APOC intentionally slow-walked the consent decree to hide the information from the voters to avoid damaging Stutes’ election chances.

The second important issue in this mess is the puzzling reason why Stutes hid the identity of donors in the first place. Back in 2022, there were no limits on how much money could be donated to a legislator’s reelection campaign. Anyone could legally contribute any amount, and since the amount of money donated was a relatively small total of only $4,559.57 from five donors, the amount isn’t large enough to raise any warning flags. Perhaps the reason the donors are anonymous isn’t the amount; it is because their identities might turn off Republican voters.

One clue to that theory is that the anonymous contributions were made using a liberal online pass-through payment processor called Democracy Engine LLC. Its founder and CEO is Jonathan Zucer, a former ActBlue executive and DNC finance operations director. Importantly, unlike a political action committee (PAC), this organization enables anonymous donations, primarily to left-of-center political candidates. Whoever used Democracy Engine LLC to funnel money to Stutes was probably from the political left, and she wanted that fact to remain hidden.

For example, since Stutes has caucused with the Democrats in the State Legislature for many years, the Alaska Democratic Party may have wanted to support Louise Stutes’ reelection campaign. If the Democratic Party donated to Stutes through the Democracy Engine LLC, their identity would be kept anonymous. Using this contribution technique is against APOC regulations, and when Stutes was caught doing so, the consent decree required her to disclose who the donors were, but she has not yet done so.

A second and more concerning possibility is that the donations were a quid pro quo from individuals seeking Stutes’ support on legislation. This could be an ethical violation of Alaska Statutes Sec. 39.52.120 or 39.52.130. We can’t confirm if that happened unless we can compare the names of the donors to legislation that Stutes sponsored in 2022. To be clear, I am not alleging that Stutes did anything illegal or unethical, but nobody can know for sure because Stutes has kept that donor information hidden.

The APOC’s mandate is to require transparency and disclosure from political candidates. In this case, they are doing just the opposite, helping Representative Stutes hide information the voters should have.

Since there are potential ethical violations involved, some people might wonder whether the Alaska House Ethics Committee should review Stutes’ actions. In reality, there is zero chance the Ethics Committee will act. The Democrat led majority in the Legislature would never allow an investigation of a prominent member of their own caucus for ethics violations; they save that tactic for use against Republicans they don’t like.

If APOC is dragging their feet and the House Legislative Ethics won’t act, that leaves it up to the voters in District C, who still have one option left to them. They have a choice in tomorrow’s primary election. They can vote for Louise Stutes, who has admitted to committing multiple campaign finance violations and wants to hide the identities of her mystery donors from the voters, or they can choose one of the other candidates in the race. I don’t believe the voters will pick Stutes, who has such difficulty telling the truth.

The views expressed here are those of Greg Sarber. Read more Sarber posts at his Seward’s Folly substack.

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