It’s Election Day, Alaska.
Current mood: 🤢
Another election, same old problems
When I left the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and embarked on this weird journey known as political blogging in 2017, it was in large part because I felt that the bounds of traditional journalism weren’t well equipped to handle a political world that was rapidly becoming anything but traditional. Trump and Trump wannabes like Gov. Mike Dunleavy have warped our politics in what one good friend likes to call “goalposts on rocket skates,” but traditional media has continued to treat them as if they are two ends of an even playing field.
Things that were once disqualifying—moral failings, open bigotry, cronyism and rank incompetence—seemed to be the point rather than a flaw in the system.
As the nation hurtles toward whatever electoral outcome we have tonight, I’ve been thinking a lot about the guiding statement I posted when I first started at The Midnight Sun. It said something to the effect that I don’t care so much about the political parties in charge as I care about good government with fair and equitable systems that create opportunities for the many, rather than siphon away resources to the well-connected.
In other words: To hell with politics, do what’s right for Alaska.
And it’s with that that I say something is seriously broken with Alaska’s elections.
I’m not talking about open primaries and ranked-choice voting—two systems that seem to have given new space for reasonable-enough moderates to operate—but the systems by which Alaskans cast their votes… or, more precisely, can’t cast their votes.
Namely, the Alaska Division of Elections has a long and troubling history with voting in rural communities that seemingly has been allowed to fester with a shrug.
They seem to always be caught off guard by unopened or late-opening polling places in rural communities. Several didn’t open during the primary election, and at least two didn’t open on time today. In the run-up to the election, at least 91 voters in Dillingham, Aniak and King Salmon were given the wrong ballots for their regions. And that’s not to mention a long-running issue with translating election materials into Alaska Native languages, chronic understaffing and other delays.
“Can you imagine if the Valley or South Anchorage or Kenai was suffering this exact kind of problem? Could you imagine a voter’s response to this delay in accessing our constitutional right?” Get Out the Native Vote Director Michelle Sparck told me earlier this year. “Because it’s in remote Alaska and far removed from their eyes and their frustrations, it’s easy to say, ‘Oh well, we checked the boxes off and did our due diligence.’”
But, as we’d come to find out, some of that is by design.
I’m talking about the witness signature requirement on by-mail absentee ballots.
While the signatures are ostensibly an anti-fraud measure, the state has acknowledged that they have never been used to identify fraud, as they don’t have a cross-check system akin to the city of Anchorage. In essence, it’s election security theater. But it has had severe consequences for rural communities.
It’s been one of the leading causes of ballot rejections for rural voters, with some districts in Region IV seeing nearly 17% of by-mail absentee ballots rejected during the 2022 special election, which was conducted by mail due to the snap turnaround. And because Alaska has no ballot curing provisions on the books, those voters were left with no recourse toward having their votes counted.
What’s frustrating about all of this is that there’s a solution right in front of us. The year that rejections for by-mail ballots were the lowest they’ve ever been for all Alaska legislative districts, rural or not, was the 2020 election when the requirement was put on hold due to the pandemic.
The Legislature had the opportunity to repeal the requirement this year in an eleventh-hour vote on an election reform measure, but House Republicans quashed the bill with somewhat understandable worries about legislating at the last minute.
In stunning comments from House Speaker Cathy Tilton last month, she admitted that the high rejection rate of rural votes is not a flaw but the point.
“The changes in that bill definitely would have leaned the election towards Mary Peltola, to be quite honest,” she told host Michael Dukes, “with no signatures on ballots in, you know, in rural areas.”
While the comments drew quick derision from groups throughout the state, we should be clear that these kinds of voter disenfranchisement efforts have been going on for a long time. The original version of the election bill they killed mainly focused on purging voters from the rolls faster—a Republican favorite. Tilton went on to say that voting reforms are needed, but, to her, that would mean ending automatic voter registration.
In the big picture, these efforts do little to increase the election security that Republicans like Tilton claim to care so much about. If they were serious, they’d be looking at a signature verification system akin to Anchorage’s that can catch suspicious activity rather than just reject ballots of people they think don’t vote the right way. There’s nothing fair and equitable about it.
At least they’re saying the quiet part out loud.
Stay tuned.
Thank you Matt. No better way to hear radical republicans say the quiet part out loud than listen to radical talk radio like Dukes (for as long as your sanity can take it). When he was in Fairbanks Dukes also sold radio station merch that suggested if all else failed, vote from the roof tops with a picture of a sniper rifle. KFAR aired Alex Jones up until a couple weeks ago. Get out of your NPR bubble, listen to what the radicals are saying, talk to media sponsors, don’t get angry get active.