Complaint filed against MEA board candidate

MAT-SU — Carolyn Covington has had a heck of a time trying to file a complaint ahead of next week’s Matanuska Electric Association election.

Covington, who is running Katie Hurley’s campaign for re-election to the board, is crying foul — or trying to — over an e-mail sent from the Alaska Republican Party urging people to vote for Robert Doyle, Hurley’s opponent.

“It’s a Web mail,” Covington said. “When it is a Web mail they have to pay for that. That means that they have expended funds in a public utility’s election, which they are prohibited from doing.”

Non-profits can influence utility co-op elections, but parties are barred from that kind of activity. Repeated attempts to reach Doyle on Friday and Monday failed as of press time.

On Friday, Covington said, the Alaska Public Offices Commission told her it hadn’t received the complaint. On Saturday, she found out why. Her complaint had been returned. She had the wrong address on it, though it wasn’t her fault — APOC had the wrong address on the complaint form. She also had the wrong address on the copy she sent to the Republican Party.

So she re-sent the APOC complaint, but didn’t have a receipt showing the party had been served. So she tried to fax it. It didn’t go through. A second try was successful, but by then APOC had denied her complaint since she couldn’t prove the party had been served.

After the successful fax, she said, she filed the complaint again. Covington said APOC has agreed to expedite it and apologized for having the typo on its complaint form.

“This is important because the election is upon us,” Covington said.

The election is scheduled for 7 p.m. April 27 at Raven Hall on the Alaska State Fairgrounds.

The e-mail that prompted Covington’s complaint contains an Alaska Republican Party banner as well as a disclaimer that the e-mail “is being forwarded to you in the spirit of sharing information at the request of the candidate and should not be construed as an endorsement of the candidate by the Alaska Republican Party.”

But Covington pointed to a couple of things that belie that disclaimer.

First, she said, Doyle asks that recipients call their friends and ask them to vote. But, more importantly, he signs off with a plea for donations.

“It’s not too late to make a contribution to my campaign!” he writes, before passing out his mailing address.

Covington said that while this may seem like a tiny infraction, “He has not gotten any money directly from the Republican Party but he is benefiting from the Republican Party.”

And that, she believes, is against the law.

Aside from legalities, there’s an intellectual issue of how this type of election should run. She pointed out that all political organizations are prohibited from jumping into the fray. Republicans can’t join in, but neither can the political action committee formed by the labor union representing MEA employees. And then she employed a slippery slope argument.

“The thing is that as long as we turn our backs on these kinds of infractions then they will continue to happen and they will continue to get worse,” she said.

For now, she said, she’s in limbo. The closest thing she’s had to a response was a public statement from APOC that it generally doesn’t involve itself in co-op elections.

Her rebuttal to that is that while APOC might not often referee fund-raising in co-op elections, there are a set of laws in place for them and APOC is the referee in election law.

“The point is that the Republicans have involved themselves in a public utility election which is prohibited by law,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.