Assembly leaders question Mayor Bronson over former top aide’s challenge to Anchorage election

Anchorage Assembly leaders are pressing Mayor Dave Bronson for answers about an incident in which one of his former top aides challenged the city’s April 4 election, quoting an internal policy that didn’t exist until the day she filed the appeal. In a July 5 letter to the mayor, Assembly leaders asked members of the administration to attend a public meeting on Friday to discuss the election complaint.

It’s not clear how former chief of staff Sami Graham and two other election observers knew of the Information Technology Department policy. It had been quietly added that day by the IT department’s director to the department’s cybersecurity page on the city’s internal network — just two hours before Graham and the two other observers filed the April 11 appeal and quoted the policy verbatim, a previous report from the Daily News found.

In their letter, Assembly leaders called for the administration to explain where the IT department policy originated.

Assembly leaders are asking whether Bronson or other members of his administration knew about the policy, its development and any coordination with the election observers:

“... The content of the complaint has led members of the public to conclude that the complaints must have been in communication with the municipal information technology department,” they said in the letter to Bronson.

“It’s a matter of public interest. We had what appears to be individuals who worked with the municipality coordinating with individuals who have kind of made sport of making complaints about elections,” Assembly Chair Christopher Constant said by phone on Monday. “There’s real concern about the abuse of our elections and the sowing of discord and mistrust in our elections. And so I think we have a duty to explore what official actions were taken by members of the administration. Just so we understand what happened.”

The policy, added just days after the election workers began tallying results, would require the IT department to authorize use of USB drives on city equipment, which would include the election center. The city clerk, ombudsman and other top city staff members have said it is not a valid policy — it did not go through city’s required process for developing and adding municipality-wide policies before it appeared on the internal network page. City staff, including the election clerk and other department leaders, had been unaware of its existence at the time Graham and the others filed their appeal.

At the time, the mayor’s office did not answer questions about the observers’ use of the policy.

[2 Bronson spokesmen will leave mayor’s office for jobs with Anchorage School District]

The mayor’s office did not immediately respond on Monday to questions from the Daily News about Assembly leadership’s letter, any response from Bronson, and whether the IT department policy has since undergone the required process.

Security camera footage at the election center also showed Bronson’s IT director, Marc Dahl, meeting with one of the observers and leaving the building together the day after they appealed.

Dahl at the time said he decided to add the policy to the department’s intranet page because the city had a “longstanding practice of prohibiting the use of thumb drives without being scanned by IT first.” Dahl at the time did not answer multiple questions, including about how the observers obtained the policy language or about his relationship with them.

The city ombudsman, Darrel Hess, has been investigating the situation since receiving a complaint from an Anchorage resident in May. The complainant was troubled by the timeline of events after hearing Graham speak at the Public Session of Canvass, Hess has said. His investigation is ongoing.

The Assembly leaders’ letter was sent to several of the mayor’s top executives, including the acting director of the IT department, Philippe Brice. The mayor’s office did not respond to a question about Dahl’s employment status. Dahl was still employed by the city as IT department director as of mid-June, according to a previous statement from the mayor’s office.

Assembly leaders in the letter asked the administration to turn over any emails or other communications between city staff and the election observers, including Graham.

Constant said they have not yet received any public records but expect to receive any before Friday’s meeting. Bronson’s current chief of staff, Mario Bird, has indicated he will attend, Constant said.