| Drunk on the law The Alaska lawyer behind that complaint, Scott Kendall of Cashion Gilmore, told The Daily Beast that the bewildering layers of grift are “almost intoxicating.” “You turn over one rock and there’s more; turn over another and there’s more there too,” Kendall said. “With the kind of simple-mindedness involved here, as an attorney it’s almost intoxicating.” Doctor’s orders While the train of shady wheeling and dealing isn’t exactly new or even all that uncommon in the world of political dark money, in this case, it’s been enabled by a curious mechanism: the creation of a new “church” to fund the whole operation—the absurdly named “Ranked Choice Education Association,” which Kendall makes no bones about describing as “completely fake.” The man behind these groups is right-wing megachurch minister Dr. Art Mathias, who among other things has openly practiced LGBTQ “conversion therapy” and has claimed that COVID vaccines cause “spontaneous abortions” in 80 percent of pregnant women. Mathias has so far sent at least $90,000 in personal contributions to the ballot committee through the RCEA. Freedom of choice Ranked-choice voting (RCV), is a ballot format that gives voters the option of listing their backup choices in addition to their preferred candidate, with those totals added up in subsequent tabulation rounds. The format is thought to help weed out extremist candidates, and it has been championed by die-hard conservatives. (Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial primary win in Virginia hinged on the process.) Still, RCV has become a political boogeyman among right-wingers, thanks largely to Palin’s efforts to vindicate her ranked-choice defeats last year. But as the allegations about AHE continue to stack up, Palin’s own choice appears increasingly misguided. The rundown According to a complaint filed with Alaska campaign finance regulators in July, the network of groups has committed an array of violations. The complaint—from an organization that supports ranked-choice voting laws, called “Alaskans for Better Elections”—alleges that the network unlawfully used the “church” to get tax breaks on donations, obscure its finances from the public as well as state and federal regulators, and has additionally kicked cash back to its own officials. The RCEA has also leaned on its self-declared status as a “nonprofit religious organization” to avoid registering as a political group with the Alaska Public Offices Commission. That argument hinges on a legal theory favored by anti-government extremists and which legal experts and courts have tersely dismissed, raising questions about whether this “church” should lose its tax status. Lloyd Mayer, an expert in nonprofit law at Notre Dame University, said that RCEA’s activities could compromise its tax status. “First, a church is disqualified from federal tax exemption under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3) if lobbying is a substantial part of its activities,” Mayer told The Daily Beast, explaining that the U.S. Treasury Department defines lobbying as including attempts to influence the public regarding a ballot initiative or referendum. A campaign finance “cascade” Kendall, the attorney behind the complaint, described the “cascade” of legal issues and violations his firm uncovered after scratching the surface. The network’s finances were so opaque, he explained, that their investigation had to reverse engineer them. “They just weren’t filing the required political disclosures,” he said. The Daily Beast reached out to Mathias and the affiliated entities, but did not receive a response. State filings show that AHE raised around $293,000 in just three weeks, with about 70 percent of that amount purportedly coming as an in-kind donation from another AHE official, Phillip Izon, who claimed to have volunteered $200,000 worth of his time after just two weeks. The RCEA “church” contributed another $76,000 to the group via checks, along with $2,358 in cash—despite state election rules that prohibit cash gifts in excess of $100. “They’re juicing it up to make it look bigger than it is,” Kendall said. “They seem to think that the public perception of their legitimacy will garner more financial support.” All Izon me But that’s just the beginning. Kendall said Izon and his wife are also the group’s sole vendors, and hauled in “every dollar” the network has spent. The group’s total expense reporting doesn’t appear to add up in the filing, either. Mathias—no stranger to fact-free claims himself—has attempted to justify RCEA’s tax status with a legal interpretation adopted by far-right, anti-government “sovereign citizen” groups. “It’s a goofy, esoteric constitutional theory, the kind of guys who get a parking ticket and say they can only pay in gold doubloons or whatever,” Kendall said. “It’s not on me to question anyone’s faith, but I don’t see how ballot measures qualify as a religious cause.” All roads lead to Soros Lloyd Mayer, the Notre Dame law professor, said this specific claim has been deemed “frivolous” in the eyes of the law. “The argument that RCEA is a tax exempt church under Internal Revenue Code section 508(c)(1)(A) and not section 501(c)(3) is frivolous because it is inconsistent with the plain language of these statutes,” Mayer said, observing that the U.S. Tax Court rejected this argument in 2000, as did the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that same year, and a California judge in 2020. In response to the complaint, Mathias attacked Kendall, a well-known Jewish political attorney in the state, as “Soros-funded” and a “Marxist.” Kendall has taken the attacks in stride. “They haven’t denied they formed a fake church, they admitted they’ve formed both of these groups as churches, and they haven’t undermined anything factual about the complaint, just broadly characterizing it as misinformation,” he said. “They say it’s none of your business, but to me that’s not a defense.”
Read the full story here.
| 