OPINION: Let’s get real about keeping dark money out of Alaska elections

It should be no surprise that those with the temerity to question the political left’s latest scheme to remake Alaska in its image by rejiggering the state’s election system would be castigated as “whiners,” “losers” or the absolute worst in Leftville, “regressive.”

Even Alaska’s largest newspaper tarred the new system’s opponents as “political opportunists” working to destroy ranked-choice voting “in the name of political ambition.”

We can argue over questions about voter turnout, disenfranchisement and bias in the new system, but at least part of the initiative-driven law needs immediate amendment.

In peddling the idea to Alaskans a few years back in a well-heeled petition effort, Alaskans for Better Elections said the sweeping proposal would do away with political primaries in favor of an open primary system and ranked-choice voting in the general election.

Better Elections promised voters the change would foster more feel-good, civil campaigns, with larger turnouts and a wider variety of candidates — and it would rid us of evil political parties. But the big selling point — the effort’s pièce de résistance — was it would free Alaska of “dark money,” or election cash of unknown origin.

What eventually became Ballot Measure 2 seemed to swat at dark money by requiring “additional disclosures for contributions to independent expenditure groups and relating to the sources of contributions.” It also required “a disclaimer on paid election communications by independent expenditure groups funded by a majority of out of state money.”

It sounds swell until it dawns on you the group’s dark-money hype was just hype. It turns out the dark money restrictions apply only to state and local elections — not federal contests, or, more telling, to initiatives or recall petitions.

That is a lollapalooza of a loophole.

Oh, skeptics challenged the petition’s wide scope as violating state law, but the Alaska Supreme Court in its innate wisdom somehow ruled it did not violate Alaska’s “one subject” requirement for initiative petitions. With Las Vegas-based Advanced Micro Targeting Inc. reportedly offering to pay signature takers up to $4,000 a month for 80 signatures a day, Better Elections managed to get the question before voters. It narrowly was adopted in 2020′s general election, 174,032-170,251.

It is worth noting Better Elections raked in nearly $7 million, largely in out-of-state dark money, to push the Alaska Ballot Measure 2 initiative and make Alaska only the second state in the nation to adopt a ranked-choice voting system.

Alaska certainly is no stranger to dark money. Cash of unknown origin paid for a miserably failed attempt to recall Gov. Mike Dunleavy, an effort launched in 2019 almost before the ink was dry on his oath of office. More recently, ongoing attack ads are targeting Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson in his endless knock-down, drag-out imbroglio with an Assembly still boiling at former Assemblyman Forrest Dunbar’s unexpected, thumb-in-the-eye mayoral election defeat a few years back. The source of the money paying for that effort remains unknown, too.

Allowing the first penny in dark money into the political process is abhorrent public policy allowing faceless, nameless puppeteers to funnel cash roundabout through this organization and that cloak their identity and true political purpose. It allows them to underwrite the destruction or subversion of our most important institutions, to make law without the Legislature and without debate, study or vetting. Instead of a long, grinding legislative process of give and take, complicated, major policy questions are settled by simple “yes” or “no” answers on the ballot.

To make it worse, such funding in Alaska inarguably has an outsize effect because of our small population, and that should steel the Legislature’s resolve to fix this mess. We’re a cheap political date and an inviting target.

The true sources of dark money in our political system likely never will be revealed. Alaska’s struggling, anemic media will not be much help. They are mere shadows of their former selves, reduced largely to parroting government “news” handouts. Most lack the resources or wherewithal to ferret out such information. Add to that: Many outlets are staffed largely by editors and reporters with little in the way of institutional memory.

Some would suggest, I suppose, we could depend on the blogs masquerading as news media in Alaska to chase down dark money sources, but too many of the few such blogs we have are backed by faceless mentors or special interests themselves.

The late Washington Post columnist David Broder, himself no fan of initiative petitions, pointed out in his “Democracy Derailed,” that they have become the “favored tool of millionaires and interest groups,” to achieve policy aims without a messy legislative process.

Dark money only makes those aims easier to achieve.

It is something Alaska’s political process can do without.

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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