State prosecutors have charged two officials in the community of Pilot Station with illegally manipulating the results of city elections in October 2022 and October 2023.
A grand jury indicted Acting Mayor Arthur Heckman Sr. and City Clerk Ruthie Borromeo on eight felonies apiece for allegedly tampering with the elections and failing to report results properly.
The indictment also states that they “induced or attempted to induce an election official to fail in the official duty by force, threat, intimidation, or offers of reward.”
A listed attorney for Heckman did not return a call seeking comment on Tuesday. Borromeo does not have a listed attorney.
Pilot Station is a town of about 600 people on the banks of the Yukon River in Western Alaska.
The charges, first reported last week by KYUK Public Media, were published July 30, and both are scheduled to appear in court via Zoom on Aug. 20.
Until that date, limited public information is available. Senior Assistant Attorney General Jenna Gruenstein said by phone Tuesday that “these are not state elections. These are local elections that are at issue.”
She wasn’t able to provide details beyond the indictment but said that “these involved elections that either weren’t held or the ballots weren’t counted at all. … Those are the allegations.”
Elections-related prosecutions “are fairly rare,” Gruenstein said. “We’ve probably charged — I would guess — less than 10 in the last five years.”
In July, a Palmer jury convicted a man of attempting to vote multiple times in the 2022 Matanuska-Susitna Borough local election. In 2022, a woman in Florida was accused of attempting to vote in both Alaska and Florida. The year before that, a Copper Center man was prosecuted by the state after signing multiple absentee ballots with an anti-gay slur.
And the state is currently prosecuting Republican former state Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux for a variety of election-related crimes. A trial is pending in that case.
“Those are the only ones that have been publicly charged. We do have other investigations that are either pending or closed,” she said.
The Pilot Station case is different from the publicly available cases, Gruenstein said, because it deals with the “election side of things,” rather than cases having to deal with individual voters.
Regardless of the origin of the alleged crime, Gruenstein said that prosecutors examine all alleged election-related crimes, “and if anybody has any information about any misconduct involving elections, either from the running of the election side of things, or people who are voting improperly, reporting it is very much encouraged, and we investigate and review these cases very seriously.”
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.