Alaska Elections

The Alaska Legislature will take up election reform proposals this session, with Gov. Mike Dunleavy introducing a bill through the House, and the Senate majority caucus planning to introduce its own reforms later this week.

The legislation is in response to a range of issues and complaints around Alaska’s elections last year, including concerns around delays in ballot counting and transparency, election security, and problems with staffing, absentee ballots, and long lines at some polling places.

Dunleavy introduced a bill through the House on Wednesday, House Bill 63, proposing new rules for, among others, voter registration, voting by mail, voting and counting timelines.

“This bill is a necessary step to ensure the integrity and transparency of our election process while addressing Alaskans’ concerns about reliability,” Dunleavy said in a prepared statement on Wednesday. “By modernizing our election code, we can provide a more efficient and trustworthy system for voters and election officials alike.”

The bill also would put new limits on voting time.

All ballots would have to be received by the state Division of Elections by Election Day, under the new legislation, when currently they just have to be postmarked and mailed by that day. It would shorten early voting time, which opens 15 days prior to and ends on Election Day. Under the bill, it would close five days before Election Day.

The bill would eliminate the automatic voter registration process when applying for the Permanent Fund Dividend. That provision was enacted in 2016, when Alaskans passed a ballot measure to allow voter registration during the application process.

For vote by mail, it would provide postage for all absentee ballots being mailed in. It would allow ballot counting by the Division of Elections to begin sooner, up to 10 days before the election. It would also create an option for communities with less than 750 people to opt for all by-mail voting for their elections.

The bill was introduced in the House on Wednesday, and referred to the state affairs and finance committees.

On the Senate side, the new majority, made up of a coalition of Democratic and Republican senators, is set to put forth an election reform bill focused on a range of issues, including streamlining the voting process and expanding access for voters.

The bill is scheduled to be introduced in the Senate on Friday, but Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski discussed the upcoming bill on Wednesday.

“First off, it addresses the fact that you have 106% more registered voters in the state of Alaska than you do citizens,” Wielechowski said. “There’s unusual reasons for that, but we’re really making an effort to try to clean up the voter rolls, because that’s been a big concern for many people.”

For mail-in ballots, the bill would also pay for postage for all ballots, and eliminate the witness signature requirement for absentee ballots, which Wielechowski said isn’t verified and has disqualified ballots unnecessarily.

“So I think a lot of Alaskans are surprised and kind of shocked that there’s this bureaucratic kind of roadblock,” he said. “And that ends up disqualifying hundreds, if not thousands of Alaskans for something that they don’t even check.”

The bill would establish a ballot tracking barcodes for absentee ballots, and a system for review. If there’s a mistake on a ballot, the bill would create an easier process for corrections, he said. “We’re trying to allow for ballot curing, which is, if you make a mistake on a ballot, the Division of Elections can notify you, and you can fix it.”

“We heard stories this past year about somebody who made a mistake on their ballot. It was identified on their absentee ballot. It was identified before the election, and they couldn’t fix it. Everybody knew there was a mistake and unfortunately, his ballot was just discounted. Yeah, so we’re trying to fix things like that.”

To address long lines at polling places, as seen in hours-long lines to vote in Anchorage last year, the bill would require ballot drop boxes be available at each regional office, if feasible, and one per every 20,000 residents.

Wielechowski said the Senate majority would not support some provisions in Dunleavy’s bill, such as eliminating the voter registration process in the PFD application. But he said they would work with the governor on election reform initiatives, as the bills move through the legislative process.

“There were some things that were similar to what we have,” he said. “And our bill is a little bit more expansive, I’d say. But look forward to working with the governor, with the (Senate) minority, and the House, and trying to come up with a solution.”

Election reform is one of the top four priorities laid out by the Senate majority caucus this year, along with education funding, energy and pension reform.

Reporter James Brooks contributed to this article.

Election officials rejected 1,303 absentee ballots in the November 2024 general election, according to a report from the Alaska Division of Elections. That’s a rejection rate of roughly 1.7%, in line with the 1.6% rate the state reported during the general election in 2022.

It’s a significantly lower rate than in the June 2022 special primary election following Congressman Don Young’s death. In that race, the state’s first all-mail election, officials rejected 4.5% of all the ballots cast across the state. That included nearly 14% of all ballots cast in the four House districts representing predominantly Alaska Native communities off the state’s road system. The high rejection rate in the 2022 special primary led to lawsuits from civil rights groups.

Get Out The Native Vote director Michelle Sparck said the relatively low rejection rate in 2024 was good news, especially when compared to the 2022 special primary.

“It’s definitely a bigger sigh of relief,” she said. “Still, we’ve got our work cut out for us on getting better at this voting process.”

The number of rejected absentee ballots was greater than the margin of victory in two races, though it’s not clear that the rejected ballots would have changed the outcome.

Election officials rejected 72 absentee votes in House District 18 in North Anchorage. That’s the highest raw total in the state and more than three times the 22-vote margin by which Republican David Nelson defeated Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh.

And officials rejected 16 ballots in Wasilla’s House District 28, where Elexie Moore defeated fellow Republican Steve Menard in the final ranked choice tally by just nine votes following a recount.

The most common reason for rejecting a ballot was “insufficient or improper witnessing,” according to a report first obtained by the Anchorage Daily News. That accounts for nearly 40% of the rejected ballots.

Alaska law requires both the voter and a witness to sign an absentee ballot. Some state lawmakers have proposed eliminating the witness signature requirement or giving voters a chance to fix their error. That’s known as ballot curing.

Some 13% of the rejected ballots had a missing or incorrect “voter identifier” — their date of birth, ID number, voter number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, and 8% were rejected for a missing voter signature.

Another 11% of the rejected absentee ballots were postmarked after Election Day. Most of Alaska’s mail is postmarked in Anchorage and Juneau, so those rejections may have included ballots dropped in the mailbox ahead of the statutory deadline. An additional 6% were rejected because they arrived too late.

Twelve ballots, less than 1% of the rejections, “were forwarded to the Criminal Division at the Department of Law for further investigation,” a Division of Elections spokesperson said, citing division Operations Manager Michaela Thompson.

Ballot curing processes could allow voters to correct some of the issues, including things like missing signatures and identifiers. Sparck said she’s “fully on board” with ballot curing, though she says chronic staffing issues at rural Alaska precincts and mail delays could present complications. She said she’s optimistic lawmakers will tackle the issue during the upcoming legislative session.

“We think that with the bipartisan coalitions, we have a chance to tackle these systemic barriers … to make voting accessibility a better reality for rural Alaska and for tribal precincts,” she said.

Nine other states require absentee ballots to be witnessed or notarized.

House District 40, covering the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Boroughs, saw the highest rejection rate. Some 5.2% of the absentee ballots cast in that race were not counted. Half of those had an insufficient or improper witness signature.

In 2020, when the witness signature requirement was suspended because of the pandemic, fewer than 1% of absentee ballots were rejected.

Alaska’s elections chief defended her division’s management of the 2024 elections at a legislative hearing last week, but she acknowledged that logistical challenges created problems for some voters.

Carol Beecher, director of the Division of Elections, reviewed the operations during a more than two hour hearing of the state House Judiciary Committee. She fielded questions from the committee’s chair, Rep. Sarah Vance, R-Homer, and other Republicans about election security and possible fraud, and she answered questions from Democrats about problems that led to rural precincts being unstaffed or understaffed, which presented obstacles to voters there.

Vance said she did not intend to cast blame, but that she hoped the hearing would lead to more public trust in the elections process.

“The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the process of the 2024 election, not the results. It’s not about the outcomes, but about making sure that every legal vote gets counted in a timely manner, and asking what improvements can be made in the process,” she said.

“A lot of the public has reached out to me and expressed a lot of frustration and concern around a lot of the activities of this election,” she said. “So this is an opportunity for us to have a conversation with the director of elections and the public so that we can gain an understanding about what happened and how the actions that we can take in the future.”

Beecher responded to Republican committee members’ queries about safeguards against fraud and the possibility that non-citizens are casting votes.

“We often get asked about U.S. citizenship as regards elections, and we are only required and only allowed to have the person certify and affirm on the forms that they are a citizen, and that is sufficient,” Beecher said. “We do not do investigations into them based on citizenship questions. If there was a question about citizenship that was brought to our attention, we may defer that to the department of law.”

Residents are eligible to vote if they are a citizen of the United States, age 18 years or older and have been registered in the state and their applicable House district for at least 30 days prior to the election. Eligible Alaskans are automatically registered to vote when they obtain their state drivers licenses or apply for Alaska Permanent Fund dividends.

Beecher said the division investigated and found no evidence of non-U.S. citizens being registered through the PFD system. “This is not happening where somebody is marking that they are not a citizen and are receiving a voter registration card,” she said.

Vance said many Alaskans remain worried, nonetheless, about non-citizens casting votes. “​​I think people are wanting a stronger position regarding the ability to verify citizenship for the people wanting to vote,” she said. “So can the division take action to verify citizenship on its own, or does it need statutory authority?” Beecher confirmed that the division does not have the authority to verify citizenship.

Tom Flynn, a state attorney, advised caution in response to Vance’s suggestion.

“We should be also wary of the limits that the National Voter Registration Act and its interpretation can place on citizenship checks and the federal voting form requirements,” said Flynn, who is the state’s chief assistant attorney general. The National Registration Act of 1993 prohibits states from confirming citizenship status.

In response to questions about opportunities for fraud through mail-in absentee voting, Beecher said the state relies on the information voters provide. “If an individual applied for an absentee ballot, and all of the information was in our voter registration system that you were eligible to vote, etc, and you had a legitimate address to send it to, then you would be mailed an absentee ballot,” she said.

Each ballot is checked for appropriate voter identification information. Ballots are coded by district, and then given another review by another group of election workers, including an observer, she said. “The observer has the opportunity to challenge that ballot. If they challenge a ballot, a challenge is sent to me, and then I review the information based on what the challenge is, and I’ll often confer with [the Department of] Law,” she said.

Alaska has notably low voter turnout, but also a steadily changing voter roll as it’s one of the most transient populations in the nation, with voters moving in and out of state.

On Election Day, Alaska has a mix of districts with ballot scanners and hand count precincts, usually in rural areas with a small number of voters, as well as voting tablets for those with disabilities. Ballots scanners record ballot information which is encrypted before being sent to a central server in Juneau. All voting machines are tested ahead of time, Beecher said. For hand count precincts, ballots are tallied up and poll workers call in the results to the division’s regional offices, she said.

“We had about 15 people on phones to take the calls that evening, and the phone starts ringing immediately, and all of the different precincts are calling in,” she said. Division workers also helped poll workers properly read rank choice ballots, she said. “And so there’s a lot of discussion that can happen on that phone call. It’s not necessarily just as simple as going through the list.”

The division of elections has 35 permanent staff who are sworn to remain politically impartial and who work in five district offices to administer the elections in the 60 legislative districts.

Beecher said the division reviews its processes, systems of communications, challenges and improvements needed in each election cycle. “The division has lists and lists and checklists and handbooks, and is very good and diligent about making sure that process and procedures are lined out and checked,” she said.

Rural Alaska problems

Administering elections in rural communities is an ongoing challenge in Alaska. Beecher answered questions on several incidents, including voters in Southwest communities of Dillingham, King Salmon and Aniak receiving the wrong ballots that had to be corrected. In August, a mail bag containing a voted ballot and primary elections materials from the village of Old Harbor on Kodiak Island was found on the side of the road, near the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

“We don’t have control over the materials when they are in the custody of the post office, in this case, it was one of their subcontractor carriers,” she said. “We weren’t told [what happened] specifically, but I know that the post office has processes when mail is lost like that, and they do deploy their processes with that contractor.”

Vance said that incident was serious.

“I hope the state is pursuing further accountability, because this is a matter of public trust that something so important was dropped out of the truck along the roadside,” she said. “It looks extremely negligent.”

Beecher said training and retaining poll workers is essential for running elections smoothly. “So one of the challenges that we run into, and frankly, it’s not just in our rural areas, the turnover of poll workers is a reality,” Beecher said. The division conducts in-person poll worker trainings, and provides support with video tutorials and by phone.

This year, in the western Alaska community of Wales, the designated poll worker was not available and so the division of elections located a school teacher late on election day to administer the polls. “It was not ideal,” she said, but they had trained back up poll workers ready to deploy this year.

“We had trained people who were situated at all the various hubs, so Anchorage, Fairbanks, Utgiagvik, Nome, and they were trained and ready to be deployed to some of these polls should we run into a situation where we didn’t have poll workers on the day,” she said. “So we weren’t able to get them to Wales only because of the weather. They were there at the airport ready to head out there. But we did send them to Egegik, and there were polls there.”

Responding to Rep. Cliff Groh, D-Anchorage, Beecher said one thing she would have done better would have been to ensure that the official election pamphlet was more carefully reviewed and checked for errors.

A notable error in the published pamphlet was the misidentification of Republican House candidate Mia Costello as a Democrat.

“Secondly, I would have made sure that our advertisement that had a name in it would not have used names,” she said, referring to a rank choice voting education materials giving examples with fake elector names, including “Odem Harris” which Republicans pointed out filled in a first choice vote for “Harris,” also the Democratic presidential candidate.

“And thirdly, I wish that I had done a better job of anticipating the level of communication that was expected and needed,” Beecher said.

In response to a question about the ballot measure seeking to overturn the ranked-choice system, Beecher said there was no evidence of fraud. The measure failed by just 743 votes.

“We did not see something that would indicate that anything untoward happened with ballots. That simply was not something that was seen in the results,” she said.

Beecher suggested some improvements for legislators to consider this next term. Those included an expansion of mail-only precincts, paid postage for ballots and a requirement that mail-in ballots be sent earlier rather than postmarked by Election Day. “On ballot counting, doing it sooner,” she said. “So potentially changing the time frames of receiving absentee ballots to having everything have to be received by Election Day.” The latter would be a big change for Alaska, which has long counted mail-in ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

Some changes may be warranted, she said.

“We are not perfect. We know that,” she said. “And we really look to doing better, and [are] wanting it to be better, and that people are confident that it is managed in a way that they have trust in the integrity of the process.”

The next Legislative session starts on Jan. 21. Under the new bipartisan majority, Rep. Andrew Gray, D-Anchorage, is set to chair the committee in the coming session.

Alaska’s three presidential electors cast their votes for Donald Trump Tuesday at a ceremony in Anchorage.

The three electors, selected by the Alaska Republican Party, were Rick Whitbeck, Ron Johnson and Eileen Becker. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, who oversees elections, introduced them during the brief gathering at the Dena’ina Center.

“Our three electoral votes are modest, but they symbolize the votes and the aspiration and the voice of all Alaskans, from the biggest communities to the smallest villages and most remote places that we have in Alaska,” she said. “These votes remind us that every state, every individual, has a stake in the direction of our nation.”

Though the electors typically cast their votes in Juneau, they met in Anchorage this year to make travel easier, according to the Division of Elections.

The electors signed certificates that will be shipped to Washington, D.C. where they’ll be counted by the next Congress on Jan. 6. The count will be overseen by Trump’s opponent in the presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Similar scenes took place across the country Tuesday as 535 other electors voted for their state’s chosen candidate. Trump defeated Harris with 312 electoral votes after winning all seven swing states in the Nov. 5 election.

Trump returns to office Jan. 20.

Alaska’s minimum wage workers will get a tiny bump in pay starting on Jan. 1 before a larger increase becomes effective six months later.

The state’s minimum wage will increase by 18 cents to $11.91 an hour at the start of the new year, the result of a ballot measure passed 10 years ago, the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development said on Wednesday.

The bigger increase will be on July 1, when the minimum wage is set to rise to $13 an hour, the result of a ballot measure approved by voters this year. The minimum wage is set to increase again in 2026 to $14 an hour, to $15 an hour in 2027 and in subsequent years, increase to adjust for inflation.

The 2014 ballot initiative also included an inflation adjuster. The upcoming 18-cent-an-hour increase was calculated according to that adjuster, the department said. The calculation used the consumer price index for the Anchorage metropolitan area, which increased by 1.5% in 2023, the department said.

Alaska’s minimum wage also applies, indirectly, to salaried employees, under state law. The relevant statute requires salaried employees to be paid at least twice the amount that minimum-wage workers would earn for a full workweek. Starting Jan. 1, that minimum pay for salaried workers will rise from $938.40 to $952.80 for a 40-hour workweek, the department said.

This year’s Ballot Measure 1, in addition to increasing the minimum wage, mandates a system of paid sick leave, with leave days to be accrued over time by workers, and bars employers from requiring employees to attend political or religious meetings unrelated to their job duties.

Supporters of this year’s ballot measure said the wage increases and other benefits were overdue in Alaska and would benefit the economy.

Even at the $13-an-hour rate to start on July 1, Alaska will continue to have the lowest minimum wage of all U.S. West Coast states, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor.

Opponents, including trade groups representing restaurant and bar owners, tourism companies and oilfield-service companies, campaigned against the ballot measure, arguing that it would harm businesses.

Alaska’s election results were made official on Saturday, after the state review board finished certifying the results. Here are five takeaways from the final results:

There were no changes in the outcomes, but the margin defeating ranked choice repeal grew

The margin between the votes rejecting the repeal of the state’s open primary and ranked choice voting system and those in favor of it grew. There were 737 more votes against Ballot Measure 2 than for it, an increase of 73 votes compared with the margin when the unofficial count was completed on Nov. 20.

Republican U.S. Rep.-elect Nick Begich’s 7,876-vote margin of victory over U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, after ranked choice tabulation was slightly smaller than the unofficial results.

In the state Senate, five Democrats and five Republicans won, leaving the partisan makeup of the chamber unchanged, at 11 Republicans and nine Democrats.

In the Alaska House, 21 Republicans, 14 Democrats and five independents were elected. That’s one fewer Republican and one more Democrat than the outgoing Legislature.

Voters passed Ballot Measure 1 by nearly 16 percentage points. The measure will increase the minimum wage in three steps over the next two and a half years, reaching $15 per hour in July 2027. It also mandates paid sick leave for all Alaska workers, and bars employers from requiring workers to attend meetings on political and religious issues.

Trump won Alaska by a bigger margin than 2020, but the state is trending away from Republicans compared with other states

President-elect Donald Trump won Alaska by a 13.13-percentage point margin, more than 3 points better than in 2020. Trump’s margin was 11.58 points more than his national popular vote margin, which currently stands at 1.55 percentage points.

It’s the 15th consecutive time that the Republican candidate won Alaska’s three Electoral College votes for president.

But while Alaska remains a red state, it’s less Republican compared with the rest of the country than it has been in a long time. The Republican margin over the Democrats ranked 22nd among the states — that is, Trump defeated Kamala Harris by a bigger margin in 21 other states.

That’s the lowest-ranking performance for a Republican in Alaska relative to other states since Richard Nixon in 1972. Since George W. Bush’s margin in Alaska was the fourth-highest among the states in 2000, Alaska has been drifting away from being one of the more Republican states: In 2004, Alaska had the eighth-biggest Republican margin; in 2008, with Gov. Sarah Palin on the ballot, it was sixth; in 2012, 16th; in 2016, 19th; and in 2020, 20th.

Turnout was down compared with four years ago, especially in rural Alaska

There were 340,981 ballots cast in Alaska this year, which is more than 20,000 fewer than four years ago, when 361,400 Alaskans voted.

Because there were more than 15,000 more people registered in the state, the turnout percentage drop was relatively steep, from 60.67% in 2020 to 55.8% this year. However, the number of registered voters is actually higher than the number of voting eligible people in the state, since voter registration is nearly universal, while legal requirements mean it can take years for voters who leave the state to be removed from the rolls if they don’t notify the Division of Elections.

Turnout declined in the four northern and western state House districts more than the state as a whole, after a similar decline in 2022. For example, House District 40, which covers the North Slope and Northwest Arctic boroughs, has the same boundaries as four years ago, but saw the number of ballots cast drop 4,677 to 3,362, a 28% decline. Direct comparisons are harder for the other rural districts, since some precincts were moved to House District 36 in the Interior. But the drop in rural voting was consistently greater than the statewide decline.

The parties’ geographic strengths shifted

For decades, Republicans were strong in South Anchorage, while Democrats excelled in rural Alaska. This year, that balance of power shifted, with Harris winning three of the six Anchorage districts that are mostly south of Dowling Road on her way to winning more votes than Trump across the city.

But Trump performed relatively strongly in rural northern and western areas, winning House District 40 by nearly 10 percentage points after losing it to President Joe Biden in 2020, and cutting the margins in the traditionally Democratic strongholds in the Bering Strait and Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta regions.

In Southeast Alaska, House District 1, which includes Ketchikan, voted more Republican than four years earlier, while Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley continued to move toward the Democrats.

The Kenai Peninsula and Matanuska-Susitna boroughs remain the mainstays of Republican statewide wins.

In the Interior, the congressional and legislative Democrats outperformed Harris in Fairbanks.

Both conservatives and progressives have things to cheer about

For Alaska Republicans, Trump’s win means the White House will be more likely to approve resource development projects than it was under Biden.

Begich’s defeat of Peltola returns the state to the all-Republican congressional delegation it has had since 1981, with the exception of Peltola’s two-plus years in the U.S. House and Begich’s uncle Mark Begich’s six years as a U.S. senator, from 2009 to 2015.

In the state Senate, more-conservative Republicans will be a part of an official caucus for the first time in two years. While the caucus breakdown isn’t finalized, it looks like the Senate minority is doubling in size, from three to six senators. Senate caucuses must have five members to be officially recognized under legislative rules. That means minority-caucus senators will again sit on committees.

For Alaska Democrats, Peltola’s win in 2022 was historic, and her defeat this year is a disappointment.

However, the Legislature is positioned to have two mostly Democratic majority caucuses – albeit in bipartisan or multipartisan coalitions. The currently announced House majority has all of the 14 House Democrats and five independents, as well as two Republicans. The currently announced Senate majority has all nine Democratic senators and five of the 11 Republicans.

If most Democrats are in the majorities it both chambers, it would be for the first time in nearly 44 years, since June 1981. All four caucuses are still trying to woo members, so there is still time for changes ahead of the scheduled Jan. 21, 2025, start to the 34th Alaska Legislature.

And both ballot measure outcomes were victories for progressives, who supported the labor-backed Ballot Measure 1 and tended to oppose the Ballot Measure 2 repeal of ranked choice voting.