Opinion ID: 2600337
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Council's Evaluations Substantially Complied with the Division's Own Prescribed Declaration Form.

Text: This is not to say that the Division, in performing its own assigned duties in the overall retention process, lacks authority to require something else from the judge by way of a declaration. Here, by promulgating its own declaration of candidacy form for judges seeking retention, the Division chose to require a specific form of declaration that differs from the declaration embedded in the judicial evaluation reports filed by the Council. As the court correctly observes in today's opinion, because the statutes are silent with regard to what substance a filing must have to be considered a judge's `declaration of candidacy,' [33] the Division has authority to adopt its own declaration form and to require judges seeking retention to comply with itjust as the Council has authority to decide what a judge should be required to submit in order to declare candidacy to the Council for purposes of initiating its retention evaluation process. But as the court also acknowledges, the Division has broad discretion to accept declarations that are timely filed but fail to conform exactly to the Division's declaration form. [34] Moreover, although the Division unquestionably had authority to promulgate and enforce its own declaration requirement, its prescribed disclosure form is not the exclusive form authorized by the legislature. As already indicated, in fulfilling its duty to evaluate judges seeking retention, the Council had independent statutory authority to ask judges to declare their candidacy to the Council; and within its sphere of operation, the Council, not the Division, had the authority to determine what constituted a valid declaration of candidacy. Viewing the retention process as a whole, it seems fair to conclude that both the Division's form of declaration and the form recognized by the Council met the broad and largely undefined statutory requirement for a declaration. Accordingly, on July 15, 2004, when the Council filed retention evaluations with the Division that reflected the Council's official determination that all judges evaluated were declared candidates for retention, its filing communicated to the Division a timely and statutorily compliant declaration of candidacy by the judges. Because the Council filed its evaluations before the Division's deadline for candidate declarations and because the evaluations complied with the statutory requirement for a declaration, the proper standard for determining whether the evaluations passed muster under the Division's prescribed disclosure form should be whether they substantially complied with the Division's prescribed form, not whether they strictly complied. Given the bifurcated allocation of institutional responsibilities that defines Alaska's judicial retention process, the Election Code's provisions requiring a judge's declaration of candidacy to be filed in the form of a declaration to the Divisionrather than as a declaration originally made to the Council and later forwarded to the Division as part of the Council's required filingamounts to a requirement of form rather than substance. And in the arena of election filings, we have consistently recognized that, so long as a filing is timely and complies with all substantive requirements imposed by law, any technical or formal deficiencies in the filing are insubstantial and may be corrected after filing. [35] Here, the information included in the Council's evaluations covered all of the substantive information required by the Division's declaration form. In my view, it follows that the Division had authority to accept the July 15 filings as timely and properly filed declarations of candidacy, subject to correction to ensure compliance with the Division's own formal and technical standards. [36]