Arizona Clean Elections Sued For Threatening Candidates Into Suspending Campaigns

The Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission (ACCEC) is being sued after its leadership allegedly threatened two Green Party candidates into effectively suspending their campaigns.

Risa Lombardo, a Green Party candidate for Arizona governor, and DuWayne Collier, a Green Party candidate for Arizona secretary of state, together filed a lawsuit against ACCEC and its executive director, Tom Collins, on Thursday.

Collins recently accused Lombardo and Collier of being “sham candidates” and submitting false signatures to qualify for Clean Elections funding based on reporting by The Arizona Mirror.

The reporting centered on claims from six voters that Lombardo and Collier faked signatures to qualify for Clean Elections funding. According to The Arizona Mirror’s analysis, Lombardo and Collier, along with gubernatorial candidate Scott Neely, submitted qualified contribution sheets that contained nearly 4,000 signatures from the same voters. The report further claimed that many of the reported contributors had never donated to any other candidate.

The media report also appears to have spurred the Arizona attorney general’s office to launch a criminal investigation into Lombardo, Collier, and Neely, announced last week.

Approximately four months prior to the media report and Collins’ accusations, the secretary of state’s office had certified Lombardo and Collier’s signatures on the forms detailing the $5 contributions needed to qualify for funding.

Collins advised in letters to Lombardo and Collier that he had been investigating claims against them, similar to those made in The Arizona Mirror’s report, and that he would request the commission to issue repayment orders for the $2.8 million and $739,000 they received respectively for their campaigns.

Collins said he had identified suspicious activity in the procurement of qualifying contributions, and accused the pair of candidates of failing in their reporting obligations. Collins stated that the secretary of state’s certifications appeared to have been made in error.

In their lawsuit, Lombardo and Collier contested the claims, and further contended that the signatures of the six individuals cited in the reporting matched the signatures given on their submitted signature forms.

Lombardo and Collier argued that the ACCEC has gone beyond its legal authority and that their campaigns have been paralyzed by ACCEC’s threats — they are unable to spend Clean Elections funds but cannot raise private funds due to their status as Clean Elections candidates.

“The Commission is without power to subsequently declare, months after the Secretary of State’s certification has been completed, that a candidate should not have qualified for Clean Elections funding in the first instance and must repay their funds back to the Commission,” stated the lawsuit. “The Defendants are trying to bully and intimidate Plaintiffs into effectively dropping their campaigns, campaigns the Commission disapproves of, by depriving them of Commission funding, or threatening to subject each to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in repayment obligations.”

Per the direction of the ACCEC, Collins is not scheduled to report on the findings of his investigation into Lombardo and Collier until Oct. 29, 2026 — just five days before the general election.

Without judicial intervention, Lombardo and Collier say they are forced to suspend their campaigns on threat of an investigation that has not yet been completed.