‘With 1,000% certainty’: Voters say candidates faked their donations to get public campaign cash

At least six Arizona residents say three statewide candidates falsely used their names to qualify for more than $4.7 million in public campaign funding.

“I can tell you right now, with 1,000% certainty, that I did not make a single contribution, let alone three of them,” Christopher Scott of Peoria told the Mirror when asked about forms filed by the candidates showing he had donated $5 to each in order to help them qualify for Arizona’s public campaign finance program.

The campaigns of Green Party gubernatorial candidate Risa Lombardo and secretary of state candidate Duwayne Collier, along with Republican candidate for governor Scott Neely, reported collecting Clean Elections qualifying contributions from nearly 4,000 of the same voters, including more than 2,600 who were listed as giving to all three.

The duplicated contributions across multiple candidates account for nearly 75% of the voters listed as giving qualifying contributions to the trio.

Those $5 qualifying contributions are a requirement for candidates who wish to access public campaign financing. Every candidate participating in Clean Elections must gather a set number of the small-dollar contributions — the exact number depends on what office the candidate is seeking — from voters to unlock the larger sums of money.

The Mirror analyzed the contribution history of hundreds of the people who supposedly made those contributions, and the vast majority had never donated to any other candidate, according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s campaign finance records. 

Six of the people whose names and addresses were submitted alongside $5 contributions to all three candidates told the Mirror that they didn’t make the donations, even though what looked like their signatures, and in some cases their handwriting, were on the forms submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office. The Mirror attempted to contact more than 50 voters who reportedly gave qualifying contributions to all three candidates and found none who said the contributions listed in their name were legitimate.

It is unclear where the money to qualify for Clean Elections funding came from if it didn’t come from the voters listed on the campaign finance forms.

Contribution slips submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office, and obtained by the Mirror via public records requests, show that $5 contributions were made to all three candidates in Scott’s name, alongside his home address, on Jan. 11. 

“Never in my lifetime have I made a political contribution,” Scott said. The $5 contributions to Lombardo, Collier and Neely are the only ones for Scott in state campaign finance records.

He added that he’d never heard of any of Lombardo, Collier or Neely until the Mirror contacted him about his supposed contributions. 

All of the voters who told the Mirror that their information was used for the donations said they remembered signing a petition unrelated to any of the candidates in a grocery store or marijuana dispensary parking lot, or at a concert, within the past year. 

“Wow this is disappointing,” Alysia Castro, of Laveen, told the Mirror via email. “I did not fill out these forms or sign them. I did sign a petition in 2025 in a Safeway parking lot and I wish I could remember what cause the petition was for.”

She confirmed that the signature on the donation appeared to be hers, although she had never signed any such form.

Castro, whose information was used for $5 donations made to all three candidates on Nov. 25, 2025, said that she had never donated to a political candidate. Campaign finance records back up that claim.

Tom Collins, executive director of the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission, told the Mirror that the commission was already aware of and “actively investigating” the suspect qualifying contributions. 

If the Clean Elections Commission finds that a candidate violated state law or the commission’s rules, it can decertify a candidate, suspend funding, order funding to be repaid or impose a penalty of up to $5,000 for candidates for statewide office. 

But if investigators confirm that the Lombardo, Collier and Neely campaigns used the information of registered voters to submit false $5 contributions, they could face consequences much bigger than repaying the campaign funding they received. 

Former Democratic Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told the Mirror that if it’s confirmed that the campaigns submitted hundreds or thousands of false $5 donation slips to the Secretary of State’s Office, the candidates, their campaign treasurers and the people who gathered the contribution slips could face numerous felony fraud charges. 

“I find the possibility to be appalling because it means that, obviously, they have no respect for the Clean Elections process or for truth,” he said. “What they’ve done is reprehensible and should be prosecuted.”

The Arizona Secretary of State’s Office did not respond to repeated requests to explain technical aspects of the campaign finance system related to the Mirror’s investigation, and also didn’t respond to a request for comment about the allegedly fraudulent $5 contributions. 

The Arizona Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions about the ramifications the candidates and their campaigns could face for submitting fraudulent contributions to qualify for Clean Elections funding, except to say that fraud is a class 4 felony.

Several of the voters who told the Mirror that their information was used fraudulently expressed anger and concern at seeing their signatures on forms that they were adamant they did not sign. 

“That is my information; however I absolutely did not make those donations,” Claudia Suchta, of Phoenix, told the Mirror in an email. “I don’t support either one of those parties.”

Suchta, whose information was used on contribution slips dated Nov. 15, 2025, for all three candidates said she would be wary in the future of signing any petitions because of this experience. 

“I am not happy about this,” she said. “It’s very disconcerting to know that my information was misused and how easily I was misled.” 

She added that she would never support a Republican candidate for governor. 

“I have been a Democrat since I started voting at 18 and the only Republican that I have ever supported was John McCain,” Suchta said. 

Neither Lombardo nor Collier responded to multiple messages asking for comment on the donations. 

Neely told the Mirror that he didn’t know anything about any false donations and that the people who recruited him to run for office had also volunteered to collect the $5 donations on his behalf. 

Neely refused to identify those people, however, and said he was unaware that the same people who are recorded as collecting donations on his behalf also collected donations for Collier. 

The same four people are in the record as collecting the majority of $5 contributions for Neely and Collier. Lombardo was listed as collecting all of her qualifying contributions.

In some cases, contributions in Neely’s name were submitted for Collier and vice versa, the Mirror found when reviewing copies of the $5 contribution slips.

Clean Elections candidates are barred from paying people to collect $5 donations, making it unlikely that the same people would volunteer to collect donations for candidates from different parties. 

The Clean Elections Act, which established Arizona’s public campaign funding system, was approved by voters in 1998. Candidates who opt to participate agree to forgo large donations and money from PACs in exchange for a fixed amount of public funding, based on the office they seek. 

In 2026, Clean Elections candidates for governor were required to collect 4,000 of the $5 qualifying contributions from registered Arizona voters. Candidates for secretary of state were required to collect 2,500. 

Lombardo, Collier and Neely all submitted more than the required amount of qualifying contribution slips. The Secretary of State’s Office and the county recorders where the contributing voters were registered reviewed samples of the contribution slips submitted by Lombardo and Collier, while Neely’s contributions were sent to the county recorders for a full review. 

Public funding was ultimately released to all three of them.

Lombardo and Neely both received more than $1.1 million apiece to campaign for the primary election, while Collier received more than $295,000. 

After Lombardo and Collier won their primaries, they received more than $1.7 million and $443,000, respectively, in public funding to campaign for the November election. Neely lost the primary to Andy Biggs, so he didn’t receive general election funding. 

The Arizona Green Party has said Lombardo and Collier are “sham” candidates who are Republicans in disguise that are co-opting the Green Party name in order to aid Biggs by leaching progressive votes from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs. 

Lombardo and Collier have both worked with businesses and people who are part of Arizona’s Republican campaign machine, including Uncle Sam Petitions and attorney Tim La Sota.

Collier is a former employee of Uncle Sam Petitions. 

Lombardo was a Republican precinct committeewoman, an elected position that is typically held by people who are highly involved in partisan politics, until five days before she filed a statement of interest to run for governor as a Green Party candidate. 

Lombardo told the Mirror in an April email that she’d been a Democrat most of her life, but that she’d been registered with both parties and her ex-husband was a Republican. 

The Mirror could find no records that Risa Lombardo and her husband Michael Lombardo, a member of the Maricopa County Republican Committee’s “Ultra Grassroots” team, had divorced. The Ultra Grassroots website describes Michael Lombardo as a “dedicated Republican activist focused on grassroots organizing, election integrity, and party engagement.”

As of May, both Lombardos shared an address and lot number at a north Phoenix mobile home park. 

Over a five-week period ahead of the primary election, Lombardo and Collier paid more than $1.2 million in public funds to Bootstrap Campaigns, a shadowy Nevada business that was incorporated by GOP political operatives on May 12. Lombardo made her first payment to the business on June 4. 

The business has no online footprint and hasn’t received payments from any other Arizona, Nevada or federal candidates. 

When the company was created, a man named David Wilson was its president, secretary and director, and Bryan McPartlan was its treasurer. But 10 days later, corporate documents were amended to list a man named Christopher Silva as holding all four offices. The company has no website, and attempts to identify Silva were unsuccessful. Wilson and McPartlan are two experienced Republican political campaign consultants who have worked together in California. 

Lombardo and Collier paid the Nevada business for a wide range of services, including consulting, mailers, text messages to voters, flyers, photography, video production, radio production, canvassing, social media management, petition gathering and sign printing and installation.

The Clean Elections Commission requires candidates who use its money to run for office to identify the people and entities they pay by name and street address, including for subcontractors, even if those subcontractors are paid through another vendor.

The Mirror found that Collier and Lombardo’s campaigns both used other businesses, including Uncle Sam Petitions and O’Neil Printing, for campaign work but didn’t list either business in their campaign finance reports. 

Goddard told the Mirror that he found the possibility of these candidates falsely using voter information and signatures to receive millions in public campaign funds to be outrageous and angering. 

“Obviously, you’ve got criminal activities, if it’s proven,” he said. “You also have just despicable fraud on the Clean Elections system. I mean, if people can get away with this, it makes the whole system look like it’s not working. So, I think you’ve got an additional public policy issue here that’s pretty important.”

***CORRECTION: Attorney Tim La Sota did not do work for the campaign of Scott Neely this year.