This article was originally published by Arizona Mirror on October 30, 2026. It is republished here under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Any views expressed are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Political Report or the Outsider Media Foundation. Title amended for clarity. Header image added by Independent Political Report. IPR encourages readers to support the author and publication by also visiting the original article.
A political action committee run by a conservative political operative has spent thousands of dollars telling voters to support a “sham” Green Party candidate for governor who is facing two investigations for campaign finance fraud.
Risa Lombardo has been disavowed by the Arizona Green Party as a “sham” candidate. The Green Party called her a Republican in disguise aimed at leeching votes from Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to benefit Republican nominee for governor, Andy Biggs.
In August, the Arizona Mirror published an exclusive report that six Arizonans said Lombardo — along with Duwayne Collier, the Green Party nominee for secretary of state and Republican Scott Neely, who lost his primary for governor to Biggs, had fraudulently used their names and signatures to qualify for a total of more than $4.7 million in public campaign funding.
Lombardo subsequently suspended her campaign amid a civil investigation by the Clean Elections Commission, which is tasked with overseeing the public campaign finance program, and a criminal investigation by the Arizona Attorney General.
But in October, the Strong Communities Action PAC, headed by Merissa Caldwell, spent $8,500 on text messages to voters, asking them to support “Rissa” Lombardo. The Strong Communities Foundation, which mostly operates under the name EZAZ, worked with the America First Legal Foundation on an unsuccessful 2024 lawsuit to challenge the way Arizona runs its elections.
America First Legal was created by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Project 2025 and one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisors.
According to campaign finance reports, the PAC paid DAME America, a business that Caldwell owns, to send those messages on Oct. 9, Oct. 11, Oct. 13, Oct. 15, Oct. 17, Oct. 22, Oct. 24 and Oct. 27.
On the same day that the first message was sent, the Strong Communities Action PAC received a $6,540 contribution from the federal Turning Point PAC, the political action committee for Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of the far-right organization Turning Point USA. On Oct. 13, the Strong Communities PAC received $6,500 from the LD10 Republican Party of East Mesa.
Caldwell told the Mirror in a phone interview that she decides on a day-by-day basis how the PAC spends its money and that neither Turning Point nor the Republican Party of East Mesa made contributions for the specific purpose of supporting Lombardo.
Neither of those entities responded to a request for comment about how Caldwell spent their contributions on a longshot third-party candidate instead of Andy Biggs, the Republican nominee for governor. Biggs has been endorsed by Turning Point, and its various committees have spent millions of dollars backing his candidacy.
Lombardo was a Republican precinct committeewoman and sold MAGA merchandise until days before she filed a statement of interest to run for governor in the Green Party. She told the Mirror in an April email that she switched parties because she most closely aligned with the Green Party platform and denied that she was a sham candidate.
But Lombardo continued to work with numerous members of the Arizona Republican Party’s campaign machine, and to live with her husband Michael Lombardo, head of the Maricopa County Republican Committee’s “Ultra Grassroots” team.
Lombardo told the Mirror that the two divorced, but the Mirror couldn’t find any record of that, and the two were still using the same address in North Phoenix as of May.
Caldwell told the Mirror that she sent out the messages in support of Lombardo because the Green Party candidate opposes Flock cameras and supports election integrity, areas where Caldwell and Lombardo align.
It shouldn’t come as a shock that her PAC has campaigned in support of both Biggs and Lombardo, Caldwell said.
“Everyone knows that I am primarily nonpartisan,” she said. “I’m libertarian in ideology. People know my values, so no one should be surprised by that.”
While Lombardo has mentioned Flock cameras and election integrity during her campaign, her campaign website says she supports the “10 key values of the Green Party” including social justice and equal opportunity, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, global responsibility and sustainability.
Caldwell, a frequent poster on the social media site X, has made numerous posts over the past several years in opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and lobbied the Arizona Legislature to take an official stance against global sustainability efforts proposed by the United Nations and World Economic Forum.
Caldwell told the Mirror that she knew Lombardo from her time working with Legislative District 2, where Caldwell is still a precinct committeewoman. She said that, until October, she had not campaigned for Lombardo or interacted with her campaign.
“I haven’t seen her in a long time. I haven’t talked to her since she’s started running for office,” Caldwell said.
Lombardo was an LD2 precinct committeewoman until February 2025.
“I didn’t know her that well, but I knew her enough to know her values,” Caldwell said. “She was never really a Republican. She always had different views on other things.”
In 2023, a business that Lombardo owned, called T3 Designs, sold buttons declaring that “Trump Won” and “Kari Won,” referring to Trump’s presidential campaign loss in 2020 and his ally Kari Lake’s loss in the Arizona governor’s race in 2022.
Lombardo also sold merchandise promoting far-right Republican Anthony Kern’s 2024 bid for Congress and a shirt bearing the GOP elephant with the letters “FJB” underneath, short for “F*** Joe Biden.”
Caldwell has closely followed recent Clean Elections investigations into Arizona Corporation Commission Candidates Ralph Heap, Kevin Thompson and Nick Myers, posting about them daily on social media. But Caldwell said the investigation into Lombardo’s campaign finances didn’t concern her, even as her organization promotes “election integrity.”
“They were investigated and cleared,” Caldwell wrongly said, adding she believed that because “someone with the Green Party had told her so.”
Neither the civil Clean Elections investigation nor the attorney general’s criminal investigation into the candidates are complete, and Lombardo and Collier both refused to provide information to the commission necessary to complete its investigation.
Caldwell has attended and given public comments during Clean Elections meetings where the investigation into Lombardo, Collier and Neely were discussed, and the commission has never indicated that it cleared any of the candidates of wrongdoing.
To qualify for public campaign funding, candidates must agree not to take money from large donors or PACs and must gather a specified number of $5 contributions from registered voters.
Gubernatorial candidates must collect 4,000 qualifying contributions and secretary of state candidates must collect 2,500, a difficult task for any candidate — especially ones without support from their party. Prior to 2026, the last time a candidate for governor qualified was 2014, when experienced Republican candidates Ken Bennett, who was secretary of state at the time, and Andrew Thomas, a former Maricopa County Attorney, both qualified.
The Mirror and the Clean Elections Commission found that Lombardo, Collier and Neely listed 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.
More than 20 of the people listed as contributors to the candidates told either the Mirror, the Clean Elections Commission, or both, that they didn’t make the contributions. Some of them said that they were approached to sign an unrelated petition in a parking lot, and their information and signatures were fraudulently used on $5 contribution slips. Others said their names and signatures were entirely forged.
The Clean Elections Commission is also investigating Lombardo’s failure to identify subvendors, as required for Clean Elections candidates.
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 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 later found that other vendors, that were not listed in the campaign finance reports, had provided some of those services.
“I don’t know why everyone (in the media is) so obsessed with her either,” Caldwell said of Lombardo. “I haven’t seen that much messaging on her.”
But Caldwell added that she believes the investigation into Lombardo’s campaign finances should continue.
“I don’t think Risa would have done anything intentionally bad,” Caldwell said. “I’m assuming that it’s probably someone — if there’s any issues that come up — it’s someone that was hired that was bad. I don’t know any of the situation with her. I can’t talk to her about anything. But I know personally that she supports election integrity.”
Be First to Comment