Democracy Fund Finds No Fault With Elicker Flyer

The board for the city’s public financing program ruled that Mayor Justin Elicker’s reelection campaign did nothing wrong when it sent out a flyer urging voters to support this year’s charter-revision ballot question, and has agreed to dismiss a related complaint so long as his campaign donates its unspent election-year dollars to the clean-elections fund.

That was the outcome of Wednesday night’s latest meeting of the Democracy Fund Board. The meeting took place at City Hall and online via Zoom.

According to Democracy Fund Administrator Aly Heimer, the board members voted 5 – 1 to find no fault with the Elicker campaign’s publication and distribution of a charter-revision-focused flyer in the runup to Nov. 7’s general election. They also voted in support of dismissing a related complaint against the campaign filed by Republican Town Committee Chair John Carlson so long as Elicker’s campaign donates to the Democracy Fund its end-of-election-year ​“overage,” which Heimer estimated at around $10,000.

The flyer in question showed Elicker and other top local Democrats calling on New Haveners to ​“vote yes” on a charter-revision question that would allow for the alders, mayor, and city clerk to serve four-year instead of two-year terms starting in 2027. That ballot question handily won approval with 64 percent of the vote on Election Day. Elicker also coasted to victory in his bid for a third term in office with nearly 80 percent of the vote.

The flyer became a point of last-minute pre-election contention when Republican Town Committee Chair (and former Republican mayoral candidate and Democracy Fund participant) John Carlson filed a complaint with the Democracy Fund.

That complaint alleged that Elicker’s campaign had clearly violated the fund’s rules by calling so directly for New Haveners to vote ​“yes” for the ballot measure, when local law prohibits publicly financed candidates from spending money on urging voters to support or oppose ballot measures. In particular, Sec. 2 – 822 (10) c. (ii) of the city’s code of ordinances, which was not cited in Carlson’s complaint, states that qualified campaign expenditures for Democracy Fund-backed candidates shall not include​“expenditures to support or oppose any ballot measure, political committee, or the campaign of any candidate other than the candidate for whom the funds were originally designated.” 

The Elicker campaign countered that they had sought guidance from the Democracy Fund and from state campaign finance regulators before sending out the flyer, that they had been told that it would be appropriate to send out campaign lit informing voters of the mayor’s position on the charter question as part of communicating his campaign’s broader policy platform, and that they had followed that advice.

“The board worked with the campaign to figure out what work they had done to clear this messaging before it was sent to the public,” said Heimer, who runs the program that provides public matching dollars and grants to mayoral candidates who cap individual donations at $445 apiece and who forswear money from PACs and special interests.

Heimer told the Independent the ​“mediated agreement” that a majority of the board members voted to support on Wednesday resulted from requests the board made of the Elicker campaign for receipts and communications related to the mailer. Those included emails between the campaign and state campaign finance regulators about the appropriateness of sending out campaign literature about the charter question.

Heimer said that the campaign spent around $6,800 in total on designing, producing, and mailing out the flyer. She also said that Elicker, who has participated in the Democracy Fund during every run for mayor he’s held since 2013, has always voluntarily donated his campaign ​“overages” to the Democracy Fund. ​“The complaint will be dismissed upon receipt of the overage funds,” she said about the condition that board members applied during Wednesday’s vote.

When asked about the specific section of local law that prohibits publicly financed mayoral candidates from urging voters to support or oppose ballot questions, Heimer said, ​“It comes down to freedom of speech. The board recognizes that charter revision was a major part of the mayor’s campaign platform,” and therefore his focus on the charter question in that pre-election flyer was not a violation of the fund’s rules.

Carlson, who in addition to helming the local Republican Party also participated in the Democracy Fund in his own unsuccessful challenge to Mayor Elicker in the 2021 general election, told the Independent on Thursday just how unsatisfied he is with the Democracy Fund Board’s vote. 

“It’s a clear violation of the rules, yet most members chose to be blind to the facts,” he wrote about the charter-focused flyer in question. He accused board members of plucking ​“ridiculous excuses out of the air” around whether or not they might get sued for violating the mayor’s First Amendment rights, and around whether or not the board’s rule was unclear. ​“None of which refute that a rule was violated.”

Carlson continued: ​“I’d demand that all the members who voted yes resign in shame, yet the mayor would just appoint more of his minions to replace them. More than ever, [it] is clear that charter reform is needed to amend the nepotism that is nurtured under our current system. A mayor should NOT be in charge of appointing people to commissions that are sworn to oversee the mayor. Most know the city is a cauldron of corruption and nepotism and run by Yale and its interests. This ​‘ruling’ merely cemented that as a fact.”

In a separate phone call on Thursday, Elicker pushed back on Carlson’s accusations of corruption as without evidence, ​“offensive,” ​“inflammatory,” and ​“totally unproductive.” He said he isn’t surprised Carlson, who filed the complaint, is unhappy with the outcome, and said ​“it is not appropriate to disparage the volunteer members of the board who clearly” wrestled with this issue and worked hard to get it right.

Elicker added that, following the most recent Democracy Fund Board meeting at which the flyer complaint was debated, his campaign set aside $6,000-plus in funds just in case the board ordered that the campaign give that back to the fund. He said that his campaign will likely have an additional roughly $3,000 leftover when it finishes closing out the books on the election year. Those two numbers taken together will likely add up to around $10,000, which his campaign intends to donate to the Democracy Fund.

“I am appreciative of how much thought the board members put into the decision,” the mayor said. ​“The board members also talked about one of the other next steps being to have more clarity around how to provide guidance to campaigns” on issues like this. ​“We were very much trying to do the right thing, proactively seeking guidance. The Democracy Fund administrator told us that, so long as it’s part of the candidate’s platform, that it is fine to include that in the materials” sent out by his campaign.

But, he conceded, ​“in future campaigns, I would steer more clear of this issue because there’s enough of a grey area that it’s not worth it.”