Voting in Juneau’s local election ends Tuesday.
Although Oct. 6 is Election Day, people have been voting since registered voters received their ballot packets in the mail in mid-September. As of Thursday, about a quarter of those ballots had been returned.
Ballot envelopes returned by mail must be postmarked by Tuesday for the vote to count. Voters also have until 8 p.m. to vote in person at City Hall or the Mendenhall Valley Public Library.
They can also drop off completed ballots there or in one of the drop boxes at Statter Harbor or the Douglas Library.
If your ballot never arrived or you need a new one, you can visit one of the vote centers to get a replacement.
This is Juneau’s first by-mail election. City staff will be using the Municipality of Anchorage’s resources to count and process ballots. Anchorage began holding all of its municipal elections by mail in 2018.
There won’t be any results on Election Night this year. Instead, ballots will be processed later in the week.
All of the ballots returned by mail go straight to Anchorage. Over 2,000 have already arrived and five cases of completed ballots received in Juneau have been sent there as well, according to Juneau City Clerk Beth McEwen.
Once the remaining ballots have been collected in Juneau on Wednesday, McEwen and another election staffer will fly with them to Anchorage, where they’ll bring them to the Anchorage Vote Center.
The first round of counting and processing ballots will take place Friday at the Anchorage Vote Center, with initial election results published online later in the day.
Election staff will continue reviewing ballot signatures and ballots still arriving by mail after that. The final election results should be certified on Oct. 20.
For more information about this year’s local election and the candidates running, visit ktoo.org/elections. Have questions about how to vote or what’s happening in the local election? Check out this list of questions and answers.
