This legal case is a project of Equal Citizens, and is led by our founder, Professor Lawrence Lessig of the Harvard Law School. It is managed day-to-day by Equal Citizens’ Chief Counsel Jason Harrow, with the assistance of attorneys Scott Broadwell and Liz Hodes in the Anchorage office of law firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.

The formal complaint asks APOC why it has failed to enforce the contribution limits against two different entities: one that supported a Republican, and another that supported Democrats. The first entity is a right-leaning independent group called Interior Voters for John Coghill. This is an outside group that supported the election of Republican John Coghill, who is currently the state Senate majority leader. This outside group accepted over $40,000 from a group called The Accountability Project. The Accountability Project claims to hold “candidates and elected officials accountable for how they impact jobs, business and economic development in Alaska.” The Anchorage Daily News, however, described it as a “business-backed political group” that supported very conservative candidates in the last election cycle.The second entity is a left-leaning independent group called Working Families of Alaska. This group supported a wide variety of Democratic and moderate or left-leaning candidates, and accepted over $220,000 in donations in 2016 from two union affiliated groups: Laborers Local 341, and Laborers’ Political Education League.These entities were not named because of any misconduct or because of any particular political stance they took. Instead, as best we can tell, they both filed their required reports and took and spent money in accordance with what APOC believes is the current law in Alaska. But even though the groups come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, they are united because both groups accepted donations well above the statutory limit (which is $1,000). Thus, we are asking APOC why it did not enforce the existing laws against these two entities.