‘Sham’ Green Party candidates tied to GOP machine as they funnel cash to a mystery company

They say they’re genuine Green Party candidates, but Risa Lombardo and Duwayne Collier are working hand-in-hand with Arizona’s Republican campaign machine, seemingly violating Clean Elections rules and sending huge chunks of public campaign funding to a shadowy, newly minted Nevada business. 

The Arizona Green Party says they are fraudulent candidates, Republicans in disguise hoping to leach votes from Democrats Gov. Katie Hobbs and Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in November. 

Together, Lombardo and Collier, who are running for governor and secretary of state, respectively, reported paying more than $1.2 million to Bootstrap Campaigns.

Over a five-week period, Lombardo dished out more than $1 million of her $1.1 million in public campaign funds to Bootstrap Campaigns. 

Collier paid more than $250,000 of his $296,000 in public campaign funds to the business. 

The Las Vegas-based Bootstrap Campaigns, which was created on May 12, has no online footprint and hasn’t received payments from any other Arizona, Nevada or federal candidates. Lombardo made her first payment to the business on June 4. 

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. David Wilson and Bryan McPartlan are the names of 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.

If Bootstrap Campaigns actually performed such varied work, it would be highly unusual. Large campaign management firms with decades of experience rarely perform such varied tasks in-house, and instead typically hire subcontractors to do much of the work — like photography, video production and sign printing.

It’s clear that multiple businesses that completed work for Collier and Lombardo’s campaigns are absent from their campaign finance reports. 

Reports from the U.S. Postal Service about the thousands of mailers that Lombardo and Collier sent to voters in June show that they originated from O’Neil Printing in Phoenix, which isn’t listed on either candidates’ campaign finance reports. 

Collier’s yard signs direct anyone with issues to contact his former employer, Uncle Sam Petitions, which gathers signatures for candidate petitions and installs signs nearly exclusively for Republican candidates. Uncle Sam Petitions gathered signatures for both candidates to make it on the ballot, but neither reported paying the business. 

Collier paid Bootstrap Campaigns more than $187,000 on June 15 for campaign management and sign installation. 

But Collier also paid his wife, Veronica Sandoval, who shares an address with him in Apache Junction, $10,000 for campaign management on June 17 and another $10,000 on July 2. 

Sandoval, who also previously worked for Uncle Sam Petitions, lists her profession in the campaign finance reports as an in-home caregiver, and her Facebook profile says she’s a stay-at-home mom. 

Clean Elections allows candidates to pay family members for services to their campaigns, but they must use itemized invoices and pay fair market value. 

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. 

Neither Lombardo nor Collier responded to repeated requests from the Arizona Mirror to explain their apparent violations of Clean Elections rules or their continued work with people and businesses that are clearly part of the Republican campaign machine.

As of the 2024 general election, both Lombardo and Collier were registered Republicans, according to Maricopa and Pinal county registration records. 

Lombardo was a Republican Precinct Committeewoman, an elected position that is typically held by people who are highly involved in partisan politics, from October 2024 until at least Feb. 28, 2025. 

She filed a statement of interest to run for governor as a Green Party candidate on March 5, 2025. In Maricopa County’s next monthly report, on March 31, 2025, Lombardo was no longer listed as a Republican precinct committeewoman.

In a tight race between Hobbs and Republican gubernatorial nominee Andy Biggs, votes for a third-party candidate could swing the outcome. With Green Party candidates typically appealing to liberal or left-of-center voters who don’t like the Democratic Party’s nominee, that could mean fewer ballots cast for Hobbs.

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.”

When he made a $104 contribution to the Republican Party of Arizona in May, Michael Lombardo listed the same address as Risa Lombardo’s campaign, in the same lot of a north Phoenix mobile home park.

On Jan. 28, Risa and Michael Lombardo gave separate $5 contributions to the campaign of Timothy Ferrara, a conservative Republican candidate for Arizona Senate. Ferrara lost his primary bid for the Republican ticket in Legislative District 2, where Michael Lombardo is still a precinct committeeman.

Ferrara’s campaign website says that he supports “limited government, fiscal responsibility, and traditional values.” He’s an advocate of nixing no-excuse early voting and hand-counting ballots, both ideas pushed for years in the Grand Canyon State by far-right election deniers. 

In June, Ferrara’s campaign paid T3 Designs — a business registered to Risa Lombardo — $4,500 for campaign sign installation. 

That’s the same business that in 2023 was selling 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.” 

Lombardo and Collier’s campaigns paid $3,000 apiece to Financial and Treasury Services, LLC, which was created on May 30, and whose principal agent is Tim Sifert, a former communications director for the Arizona Republican Party.

Sifert, who runs the American Campaign Finance Foundation, is a longtime GOP consultant. He serves as the treasurer for numerous Republican campaigns, including Local Majority PAC, which supports conservative candidates.

Lombardo also paid $50,000 to Tucson-based Gigs AZ, which is operated by Jose Acuna, who works for the Arizona Republican Party.

When Lombardo faced legal challenges to the voter signatures she gathered to make it on the ballot, she was represented by Republican election attorneys Tim La Sota and Kory Langhofer, whose past clients have included Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Arizona Republican Party.

Neither Langhofer nor Statecraft, his law firm, are listed in her campaign finance reports. 

Lombardo and Collier both collected enough signatures to make it onto the July 21 primary ballot, while the candidates that the Arizona Green Party endorsed did not. The Green Party-backed candidates instead ran a write-in campaign that party leaders believe did not garner enough votes to beat Lombardo and Collier. The complete write-in results won’t be known until after the counties finalize their results on Aug. 3. 

The Green Party’s write-in campaign included sending post cards to all voters registered to the party and making social media posts that called Lombardo and Collier “fraud” candidates.

“We are disappointed that the Arizona Republican Party, who purportedly stands against Election Fraud and for Election Integrity, continues to remain silent about operatives in their party engaging in candidate fraud on the Arizona Green Party’s ballot line,” Jon Ralston, recorder for the Arizona Green Party, told the Arizona Mirror in an email. “Candidate fraud is election fraud, and the Arizona Republican Party has routinely engaged in election fraud in this manner since approximately 2008.”

Ralston was the Green Party’s write-in candidate for secretary of state. 

There’s evidence to back Ralston’s claim. In 2008, Democratic state Rep. Jackie Thrasher said she believed a Green Party candidate who received donations from her Republican opponents led to her losing a reelection bid.

And in 2010, a former Republican legislator recruited unhoused people and street performers to run as Green Party candidates, admitting that those candidates might take votes that otherwise would have gone to Democrats. 

In a July 16 social media post, Lombardo wrote that she was disappointed in the hostility directed at her since joining the Green Party. 

“I believe we should encourage people to explore different parties and welcome independent thinkers, instead of reinforcing the two-party system,” she wrote. “When I talk with people who feel politically homeless, I find we have a lot in common. That’s why I’m running, to give voters like me, a voice.”