Editorial: The case of the disappearing decision

The Alaska Public Offices Commission. (Alex DeMarban / ADN) For four days, Alaska had an answer to what happens when a candidate defies the state's financial disclosure law: The Alaska Public Offices Commission investigates, and if the violation is serious enough, the candidate doesn't appear on the ballot. Late Friday night, Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom threw that answer out. Dahlstrom reinstated Treg Taylor's candidacy for governor, as well as Jose Tagle's for a state House seat, just four days after her own office said the law required otherwise. Her change of course is based on a Department of Law review that she has not made public, that reaches no legal conclusion and that exists, by her own account, because checking other candidates' filings against public records turned up 'numerous potential discrepancies,' too. This isn't a sequel to the story of a former attorney general who thought disclosure law didn't apply to him. It's a worse story about what happens when political strategizing becomes the basis of an election, rather than objective and fair law. The facts up to Friday were straightforward. APOC voted 4-1 on Aug. 28 that Taylor had not substantially complied with the state's financial disclosure law after he reported more than $1 million in rental income without adequately naming the tenants who paid it — even after a deficiency notice and a prior commission order telling him how to request confidentiality for his tenants if he wanted to do so. Dahlstrom announced Aug. 31 that she would not certify Taylor, citing a law she called 'not unclear.' Taylor's running mate, Candi English, took his spot on the ballot; his wife, Jodi, took hers as the lieutenant governor candidate. Legislative candidate Tagle was disqualified the same week for filing a blank disclosure form and not correcting it within the allowable time frame. Then came Friday night. According to Dahlstrom's office, the Department of Law — which Taylor himself ran until a year ago — conducted an 'independent' but 'informal' and 'preliminary' review of candidates' filings and found discrepancies against public records broadly enough that Dahlstrom said she could no longer apply APOC's recommendations 'with confidence across the field of candidates.' She staked that judgment on a document few people outside of her office and the Department of Law have seen. She did not say which candidates' filings raised discrepancies or how many. And she acted without APOC's input. Department of Law staff gave the commission a working draft of the same findings Thursday evening, and the commission — a bipartisan body that reaches its conclusions in public — has not voted to change anything. Dahlstrom overruled it alone. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, photographed in July 2024. (Marc Lester / ADN archive) Bernadette Wilson's name belongs in this story regardless of what the Department of Law memo says. Her May financial disclosure lists Denali Disposal as her full-time employer and names her as its general manager, paying $100,000 to $200,000 — but never lists the company as an ownership interest, even though state corporate records show she owns 75% of it. Her filing also shows no debts, despite her company spending much of 2025 working off a $57,400 default judgment for unpaid fuel bills that wasn't satisfied until September. Whether Wilson's filing is among the 'discrepancies' the department flagged is something only Dahlstrom's office can answer, and it hasn't. Alaskans shouldn't have to guess at that with just weeks to go before an election. ADVERTISEMENT Taylor isn't hiding what he thinks happened. Minutes before Dahlstrom's statement went out, he posted a 'Godfather: Part III' clip to social media captioned 'IT'S ON BABY.' An hour later he released a statement: 'They realized that if they applied the same standard they used against me, they'd have to remove multiple candidates from the ballot, throwing our election into chaos. So they put me back on. That tells you everything you need to know.' Taylor's brush up against campaign finance law isn't the work of nefarious 'political insiders' — nobody invented the disclosure law just for Taylor, and he still never identified his tenants as the law requires him do. In the operational reality of this breakdown, though, Taylor is correct. In fact, his own campaign publicly acknowledged that many other candidates would likely fail the exact disclosure standards that were applied to him. That makes the mistake here a doubled one. First, uneven enforcement hit Taylor's candidacy without visibly touching anyone else's. Then, instead of fixing that by opening every candidate to the same public review, Dahlstrom did the opposite: She pulled scrutiny back from the two candidates already caught, based on a memo not publicly available, days before ballots had to be finalized. And it's still unclear what happens to Dean Hickel, a third candidate APOC flagged, alongside Taylor and Tagle. None of this proves a rigged election, and it shouldn't be called that — yet. No ballot has been printed, let alone tampered with. What it proves for now is that Alaska's certification process under the leadership of Nancy Dahlstrom is a joke. Apparently, it can be reopened and settled behind closed doors on a Friday night, on the say-so of her alone. Contrary to all the claims of ballot stuffing and boogeyman hacks of electronic vote counters, this is how elections are rigged. ADVERTISEMENT Three wrongs don't make a right. Treg Taylor should follow the law. Dahlstrom should release the Department of Law's review in full. APOC — not a lieutenant governor acting alone — should immediately notify the public that it is conducting an emergency review of all candidates' filings, and that it will give each candidate five days to correct any deficiencies. After that it will recommend removal of any candidate that doesn't follow the law. Only then can the public trust that the game is being played fairly. The Legislature has work to do here as well. Lawmakers need to fix what's actually broken: a $1,000 financial disclosure threshold so low that, on Taylor's own telling, much of the field might fail it. Taylor was not 'targeted' by a weaponized commission, as he claims, and Wilson has not been shown to have broken the law. But in four days, Alaska went from enforcing its disclosure law unevenly to barely enforcing it at all — and did it on a Friday night, without showing its work. Dahlstrom said certification decisions 'have to rest on a process that can be defended as to every candidate.' She can start by following her own advice and defending this one in public.