November 04, 2022 12:50 PM UTC

Paul Archer Has Lots of Excuses; All of Them Are Bad

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• by: Colorado Pols

Running for a state legislative seat is a lot of work, but the basic process of becoming a candidate is not particularly complicated. Unless you are Paul Archer.

Archer is a businessman of some sort who has donated significant amounts of money to Republican candidates over the years, and now it’s his turn to be on the other side of the campaign fence. He is currently the Republican candidate for State Representative in HD-37 (Arapahoe County), which became an open seat after the legislative redistricting process.

Archer has been getting some bad press lately after trying to reverse his decision to accept voluntary spending limits by creating a fake candidate to run against him and claiming that a sentient campaign finance system has singled him out, or something. This got Archer into trouble, for obvious reasons, which is how he ended up being represented in a federal courtroom by none other than former Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler.

Take a deep breath, because this is a weird story about a weird dude.

Archer apparently ticked the box to accept Voluntary Spending Limits (VSL) when he first filed to run for HD-37 in February. Candidates for State House who choose to accept the VSL agree to impose a spending limit on themselves of $88,225 in total in exchange for being able to collect $800 per donor in a given election cycle — double the normal campaign finance limits.

It wasn’t until many months later that Archer decided he didn’t really want to abide by the VSL because he wanted to use his own personal wealth to help fund his campaign.

As Michael Karlik reported last week in a detailed story for the publication formerly known as the Colorado Statesman, this is about when Archer’s eventual march to a federal courthouse began:

After a seven-hour hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang on Friday, there was no definitive explanation for why Paul Archer, who is running to represent House District 37 in the south metro area, became subject to the state’s voluntary spending limits in the first place.

The testimony led to an even stranger question: Was the state’s electronic system for tracking and reporting campaign spending actually responsible for a pair of unheard-of glitches that created a phantom candidate, changed Archer’s responses, and otherwise affected a competitive Arapahoe County race?

This all started on June 29, when Archer and his son, Andy Archer, participated in a video call with Garrick Frunz of the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. As Karlik reports:

Frunz testified the Archers wondered if there was an opportunity to withdraw from the voluntary spending limits.

“We just need somebody else to enter the race and that would trigger the opportunity for him to withdraw his acceptance,” Andy allegedly said. Frunz said he cautioned against any tactics involving a non-legitimate candidate. [Pols emphasis]

Frunz and Paul Archer exchanged roughly 14 emails until Aug. 12, when Frunz finally informed the candidate the secretary of state’s office decided Archer was ineligible to revoke his acceptance of voluntary spending limits.

Archer then began to argue that he should be allowed to opt out of the VSL even if he “inadvertently clicked a button on a website.” This approach ultimately failed, in part, because nobody believed Archer given that it took four months for him to figure out that he didn’t want to abide by the spending limits. Archer would later argue that his campaign was “handicapped” by his “inadvertent” acceptance of the VSL and that he had always intended to spend his own money on paid media efforts. In other words, Archer is the victim here, because of course he is.

Anyway, you can probably guess where this is headed next.

Based on Archer’s own testimony in federal court, the candidate himself went to the Secretary of State’s website and created a Unity Party candidate named “Ammon Ray Jones.” Whenever a new candidate enters a race, the candidates who were already filed have a 10-day window in which they can revoke their acceptance of the VSL. There is no such person named “Ammon Ray Jones,” but there is someone named Ammon Franklin who is an acquaintance of Archer…though Franklin had no idea that his personal information was being used to launch a fake campaign.

As Karlik explains:

“You and Mr. Archer are friends, is that right?” Assistant Attorney General Peter G. Baumann asked Franklin on the witness stand.

“That’s correct,” responded Franklin, who said he had never to his knowledge visited TRACER, the state’s online campaign finance system. “We met perhaps eight years ago at church.”

Archer admitted he had entered the name “Ammon Jones” into TRACER, which also generates candidate affidavits. He did so because he wanted to see the “rigor involved in the process” of registering a candidacy. Archer insisted he had never clicked the submit button.

Archer allegedly created the Unity Party candidate “Ammon Ray Jones” and included a physical address near Franklin’s actual place of business. For some reason, he also used Franklin’s real email address. Franklin was understandably alarmed by this.

After his fake candidate thing failed, Archer hired Gessler and started filing injunctions claiming that the SOS candidate website (TRACER) had opted him into the VSL without his knowledge. We’ll call this the “Sentient TRACER” defense.

This argument also failed, by which point the Colorado Attorney General’s office was asking questions about why Archer’s campaign finance reports still reflected $800 campaign donations if he didn’t want to abide by the VSL. Archer claimed it was a clerical error, dispatching with his previous allegation that he was victimized by a self-aware campaign finance robot.

The end result of all of this nonsense was an angry federal judge. As Karlik reported in a subsequent story on Wednesday:

A federal judge on Wednesday rejected a Republican candidate’s request to spend freely in the final days of the election, after he had inadvertently signed up for voluntary spending limits when he registered his candidacy. [Pols emphasis]

U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang refused to grant a preliminary injunction to Paul Archer of Centennial, who is running to represent House District 37 in the General Assembly. Although Archer registered to run in February and realized in June that he had opted in to a campaign financing mechanism that requires him to limit his overall spending, Archer only sought a judge’s order to block the spending limits two days after county clerks began mailing ballots.

Wang faulted Archer and his campaign committee for the unreasonable delay…

…”To ask the Secretary to revisit the candidate affidavit process or adjust information provided to voters after ballots have issued and voting has begun is an extraordinary remedy not justified by the evidence tendered by Plaintiffs,” wrote Wang.

The judge added that an order to exempt Archer from spending limits could lead to lawsuits from other candidates who also wish to change their status.

It’s unclear what might happen next from a legal standpoint. In the meantime, Archer will presumably focus on trying to defeat Democrat Ruby Dickson on Tuesday. For his sake, we hope Archer comes up with a message better than the one that leads off the narrative on his campaign website: “Whether in the business environment or in our community, I have an eye for how to make things better.”

Sure seems that way!