The Juneau Assembly officially killed a proposal to locally implement ranked choice voting on Monday night. The body unanimously voted to indefinitely table the ordinance to adopt a ranked-choice voting system for municipal elections beginning next year.
The decision came after multiple people testified on the topic at the Assembly’s regular meeting, almost all against adopting the change. Roger Calloway said he doesn’t think the decision should be up to the Assembly.
“I’m here to testify against adopting this ordinance. I believe it’s wrong for you, the Assembly, to decide how we, the voters, get to cast our votes,” he said.
Alaska already uses a ranked choice voting system for statewide elections. In local elections, Juneau voters choose one candidate in single-member races, like Assembly seats. With ranked choice voting, voters would have instead ranked candidates by preference.
Juneau’s recently retired city clerk, Beth McEwen, testified against the change. She said that while she supports ranked choice voting at the state level, she argued it’s unnecessary for Juneau and would confuse voters.
“I think it was a good decision for state elections, not for local elections,” she said. “Local elections are nonpartisan. The state has a partisan system — and we have primaries and general elections at the state — we don’t have that at the local level.”
Assembly member Ella Adkison originally introduced the ordinance earlier this summer. She made the motion to table it indefinitely on Monday, which means the proposal is dead. A similar ordinance could still arise in the future under a new Assembly.
Adkison said it is not the right time to implement the change as the city faces more pressing issues like budget cuts following the results of the recent local election.
“We are going to have to cut services, and we are going to have to lay people off, and that is a thing we are going to work together as a community to get through,” she said. “But it’s going to be a really tough time for Juneau, and we’re going to have to spend a lot of time and energy as a community getting through that hard time.”
According to data from the state’s Division of Elections, Juneau voters favored ranked choice voting at the state level. Juneau overwhelmingly voted against a repeal effort on the ballot last election, which only very narrowly failed statewide. Advocates have already filed new initiatives in an attempt to repeal it in the 2026 state election.
