Highlights
- Lombardo and Collier sued the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission on Sept. 10 to block a potential repayment demand.
- The two candidates received a combined $3.54 million in public funding now under investigation for fraudulent $5 qualifying contributions.
- Clean Elections Executive Director Tom Collins found 74% of roughly 5,000 unique donor names were shared across the three candidates under investigation.
- Collins must issue a repayment recommendation by Sept. 24 at the earliest and no later than Oct. 29.
Two Green Party candidates under civil and criminal investigation for allegedly fraudulent campaign-finance filings sued the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission on Sept. 10, asking a Maricopa County Superior Court judge to block any order requiring them to repay millions in public campaign funding.
Gubernatorial candidate Risa Lombardo and secretary of state candidate Duwayne Collier, represented by attorney Tim La Sota, named the commission, its executive director Tom Collins, and the state of Arizona as defendants. The suit accuses them of overstepping their legal authority and violating the candidates' First Amendment rights.
Lombardo received $2.8 million in primary and general election funding; Collier received nearly $740,000, according to KJZZ reporting on the commission's Aug. 27 meeting. Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Neely, who did not advance past the primary, received $1.1 million and is also under investigation, though he is not a party to the lawsuit.
The investigation centers on whether the three candidates fraudulently used voter information to submit enough $5 contributions to qualify for a total of more than $4.7 million in public funding. Collins told the commission at its Aug. 27 meeting that he found approximately 74% of roughly 5,000 unique donor names were associated with more than one of the three candidates, with nearly half linked to all three. Six donors told the Arizona Mirror they never made contributions to any of the campaigns, and that their information had been taken without their knowledge from unrelated petitions signed in grocery store or marijuana dispensary parking lots.
Collins also found that the candidates' bank accounts showed lump-sum deposits equal to the total $5 contributions they reported collecting, rather than the incremental deposits one would expect from cash gathered over months. For Lombardo and Collier, those deposits were made the same day they applied for Clean Elections funding.
In Aug. 25 letters, Collins informed all three candidates that the commission might require repayment once his investigation concludes. The commission directed Collins at its Aug. 27 meeting to issue his recommendation by as soon as Sept. 24 and no later than Oct. 29.
Who has authority to claw back the money?
The central legal question in the lawsuit is whether the Clean Elections Commission or the Arizona Secretary of State's Office holds authority to decertify a candidate's funding after it has been disbursed. La Sota argued in the complaint that only the secretary of state, acting on county recorder signature checks, can approve or deny Clean Elections funding, and that the commission has no power to reverse that certification months later. A 2001 legal opinion from then-Attorney General Janet Napolitano found the secretary of state controls initial approval, but her opinion did not address which entity could claw back money later found to be fraudulently obtained.
In addition to the contribution-fraud investigation, Collins told the commission he believes Lombardo and Collier violated campaign finance reporting laws by failing to disclose subcontractors. O'Neil Printing in Phoenix and Uncle Sam Petitions performed work for both campaigns but were not listed in their campaign finance reports. Collins declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The Arizona Attorney General is also investigating all three candidates. Collins's repayment recommendation is due no later than Oct. 29.
Sources
Every factual claim in this article traces to one of the sources below. See how we work for the editorial process.
- azmirror.com retrieved 12/09/2026 01:09
- kjzz.org retrieved 12/09/2026 01:09
Authored by The Scottsdale Signal. Drafted by AI from primary-source material under our beat-specific editorial guides; reviewed by humans before publish under our five-gate process. Sources retrieved at 12/09/2026 01:09. Every claim traces to a source.
