Lombardo, Collier, Neely Face $4.7M in Clean Elections Repayments Over Questionable $5 Donations

Where were all the $5 bills?

Clean Elections Commission executive director Thomas Collins is calling on Green Party gubernatorial candidate Risa Lombardo and two other candidates to repay $4.7 million in public Clean Election Funds because of allegedly improper qualifying contributions. He’ll present his findings to the Commission in a meeting on Thursday. In a letter to the candidates, he said the combined evidence indicated a “level of suspicious activity well beyond what I have witnessed in 16 years.”

Lombardo’s campaign dated her qualifying forms over several months, but the money wasn’t flowing into her campaign accounts. Then on May 4–the day she applied for public funding–her campaign made a single $21,485 in-person Bank of America deposit. So this raises an obvious question: Did the campaign really hold nearly 4,300 individual $5 contributions somewhere for months?

Arizona Mirror reported this week that several individual donors say they didn’t make the contributions to Lombardo, Green Party secretary of state nominee Duwayne Collier, and defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Neely. Collins says that the Commission’s case doesn’t depend on proving that the campaigns falsified donor records. He argues that the campaigns can’t connect the money deposited into their accounts with the voters whose forms supposedly generated it. He says the investigation is nearly complete, although he doesn’t expect to request final action Thursday.

Collins told Arizona Globe that the donation forms and the bank deposits seemed to exist on two separate timelines. The bank records show large in-person transactions, not a steady stream of small ones as the money came in. The candidates had the forms and ultimately deposited the correct-looking totals, but Collins says the records don’t demonstrate that those deposited dollars came from those named voters.“There’s a temporal break between where the money was and when they filed the claims,” he says. “It also creates a physical break between the dollars and where they came from.”

Collins says that missing link is central to his case for repayment. “I couldn’t say in any context right now what the evidentiary or documentary trail is from the qualifying slips to the deposits made in the bank. Nor could I tell you the source of the money because of the absence of that link.”

He did observe that the Green Party renounced the nominations of Lombardo and Collier, leaving them with no obvious party network explaining why the same voters repeatedly appeared across these candidates’ qualifying contributions. On X on Thursday, the Green Party implied a connection with the state Republican establishment, and said, “Returning of the public money that they stole as a part of their scheme is an important first step.” It called for an independent Attorney General investigation, adding, “we suspect this conspiracy goes much higher.”

Arizona Globe reached Lombardo via phone on Thursday, but she hung up before commenting.

Collins says no single transaction necessarily proves wrongdoing. What concerns him is that every irregularity points the same way:“The problems here arise because all the pieces are problematic pointing in the same direction. We don’t do this kind of thing lightly.” He says that until the candidates can explain where the money was and how it reached their accounts, the gap between thousands of forms and several lump-sum deposits remains the central problem.

“You wouldn’t keep $20,000 in five-dollar bills in a shoebox,” he says.