A man who appears to be incarcerated in New York state, and who filed unsuccessfully to run for office in Nevada’s 2024 election, opened a new paper trail in September by requesting contact information for members of Nevada’s news media.
On Sept. 2, the city of Reno received a public records request—handwritten and sent through the mail—from an Eric Hafner. He asked for contact information for everyone to whom the city distributes press releases and media alerts. It read, in part:
Your agency/office obviously has this information as you regularly send out email blasts of press releases to news media! You are required to produce it under state law.
On Sept. 10, the city of Las Vegas received a public records request from Hafner with the same wording; the city complied and gave Hafner the requested information. According to Jace Radke, public and media relations supervisor for the city of Las Vegas, lists of news-media contacts are not commonly requested from his office.
“This is the first I can remember in years,” Radke said in an email. “Our records request volume is very high. The city of Las Vegas had 15,679 requests for the calendar year of 2024.”
The email address on Hafner’s public-records requests is the same address on records from his attempts to run for federal office in several states.
News articles from the fall of 2024 say that Hafner was, as of then, an inmate at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in New York. According to The Associated Press, and other news sources, “Eric Hafner was convicted in 2022 of threatening to kill judges, police officers and others and sentenced to serve 20 years in federal prison.”
According to prison records, his release date is Oct.12, 2036; however, he is marked as “NOT IN BOP (Bureau of Prisons) CUSTODY.” A note on the BOP’s “Find an inmate” page says this designation means “the inmate is no longer in BOP custody; however, the inmate may still be in the custody of some other correctional/criminal justice system/law enforcement entity, or on parole or supervised release.”
Calls to the Bureau of Prisons to clarify Hafner’s location were not returned as of our press deadline.
Hafner ran as a Democrat seeking a U.S. House seat in Alaska’s 2024 election. The Alaska Democratic Party unsuccessfully sued to get him off the ballot. He got 3,417 votes, totaling around 1%. It was a close race in which Republican Nick Begich won by less than 7,000 votes, or about 2% of those cast. (If all of the votes cast for Hafner had gone to the Democratic candidate, Mary S. Peltola, Begich still would have won.)
According to Ballotpedia, Hafner attempted to run for a U.S. House seat in Florida’s special January 2025 primary as a Republican but was disqualified.
According to a 2024 New York Times report, “Mr. Hafner has been a fringe congressional candidate at least twice before: in Hawaii in 2016 as a Republican and in Oregon two years later as a Democrat.”
In Nevada, Hafner attempted in 2023 to file to run in 2024. He filed suit in federal court seeking an order to require the state to place him on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. congressional district. He applied for a waiver of fees due to his inability to pay them.
A U.S. District Court in Nevada approved Hafner’s request for a fee waiver, but upon reviewing the merits of the case, determined that Hafner had not satisfied the requirements for ballot access under Nevada law, since he offered nothing to the court showing he is a resident of Nevada.
On April 9, 2024, Hafner filed a new case, pointing out that there is precedent for allowing a candidate to run, even if the candidate is not a resident of the state.
The court dismissed that case due to procedural errors—but Hafner was correct that it’s indeed legal to run for office from out of state. He cited Schaefer v Townsend, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case decided in 2000, which determined that a congressmember, if elected, must reside in the state they represent, but a candidate may file to run for office from out of state.
The fact that Hafner has requested media lists from Reno and Las Vegas would seem to suggest that he intends to seek media attention in Nevada, but his motivation to do so is not clear.
As of press time, the RN&R has not received any communications from him.