4 Special Coverage

The purpose of Tuesday’s primary election is to narrow each field to four candidates. But few races have more than four to start with.

One is the state Senate race in Eagle River, at the northern edge of Anchorage, where the incumbent, Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick is under attack for her willingness to work across the aisle.

Republican Jared Goecker, who’s running a well-funded campaign to challenge Merrick from the right, is hoping that plays to his advantage in a community where Donald Trump won roughly 60% of the vote in 2020.

“When you’re voting 90% of the time with (Democratic Anchorage Sen.) Forrest Dunbar, and you’re saying you’re a conservative, that’s not conservative,” Goecker said while canvassing supporters ahead of the primary in a get-out-the-vote push in Eagle River this week. “That’s not even, like, moderate Republican — that’s left of center at that point.”

For the last two years, Merrick has been part of the bipartisan Senate majority, which includes 17 of the state’s 20 senators: eight Republicans and nine Democrats. The caucus has governed with a focus on down-the-middle policies, and it’s often been at odds with the conservative-led state House and Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

Goecker was an appointee in former Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson’s human resources department, and before that, he negotiated contracts with labor unions on behalf of the Dunleavy administration. He pitches himself as much more aligned with the governor.

Take the Permanent Fund dividend — Goecker said he prefers a 50-50 split of the state’s annual 5% draw from the Permanent Fund to go directly to Alaskans, just as Dunleavy has supported. Also like Dunleavy, he opposes a return to a defined benefit, pension-style retirement system for state employees, which he called “unaffordable and unsustainable.”

Or consider the fight over education funding: This year, the House and Senate passed a bill that would have boosted the base student allocation, the biggest part of the state’s funding formula for public schools, by wide margins. But they failed by a single vote to override a veto from Dunleavy.

Goecker wouldn’t say how he would have voted if he’d been in the Senate at the time, but he said it never would have come to that.

“We would have had a Republican Senate that’s working with the governor, actually negotiating with the governor to figure out what those priorities are, instead of passing something without knowing if the governor is going to sign it or not,” he said.

A spokesperson for Dunleavy declined to say whether the governor had a preferred candidate in the race, citing state ethics rules.

Goecker, whose brother Josiah was shot and killed last year, said he was also interested in tightening bail requirements and speeding up court proceedings.

“There’s such a terrible bottleneck in our criminal justice system that’s really making it hard for us to put bad guys away and keep bad guys away,” he said.

Merrick defends her work across the aisle

In an interview at her home, Merrick defended her work with colleagues from both parties.

Before her election to the Alaska Senate, Merrick spent four years in the state House. Merrick spent her first two years in the minority, and she “was not able to get a lot done” in that position, she said. That influenced her decision to join the emerging bipartisan majority caucus after her November 2022 election to the Senate, she said.

“You have to be in the majority if you’re going to deliver,” she said.

Merrick has taken some positions contrary to Dunleavy’s. She voted for the education bill twice. She supports a defined benefit retirement plan, citing a fiscal analysis of the bill that found it would save the state money and improve employee retention. (Competing fiscal analyses of the bill have come to mixed conclusions on the cost of returning to a pension-style plan.) Merrick also supported using 25%, rather than 50% of the annual drawdown on the Permanent Fund for dividends while on the Senate Finance Committee.

But Merrick said there were plenty of ways she did work closely with the Dunleavy administration. She points out that she was with the governor on legislation addressing the state’s natural gas crunch and a wide-ranging crime bill.

“When I’ve talked to people that said, ‘Oh, you work with Democrats,’ I ask, ‘What policy did I support that you disagree with?’” she said.

While she often voted alongside Democrats in the Senate, Merrick said she worked with her colleagues to lend her conservative point of view to legislative debates before they reached a final vote. Most of her constituents, she said, want basic government services, not partisan hits.

“I think that there might be sort of a fringe group of folks that want a legislator that’s going to go down to Juneau and throw bombs and, you know, keep things from happening,” she said. “But I think the majority of people want results.”

Merrick said she hopes that’s a message that appeals to voters more than the call for adherence to Republican unity.

Other Republican candidates oppose bipartisan majority caucus

Of the three Republicans challenging Merrick, Goecker has a sizable lead in fundraising. But he’s not alone in making Merrick’s willingness to work across the aisle a key issue.

Former state Rep. Sharon Jackson, who served two years in the House after Dunleavy appointed her to fill a vacancy, said she’d only join a majority led by conservatives similar to what exists in the state House.

“I will be loyal to the Republicans,” she said in an interview at a Chugiak coffee shop and bakery. “I will not turn my back on them, no matter what.”

Jackson said her focus is on improving Alaska’s economy, including by making the state into a destination for those seeking treatment through regenerative medicine, which she said includes unconventional therapies like platelet-rich plasma infusions and sessions in high-pressure hyperbaric chambers.

“That would really be a major boost,” she said.

Former Rep. Ken McCarty, who succeeded Jackson in the House, said he, too, would only join a coalition if it were led by Republicans.

“Being able to look at moderate issues, but conservative-led, yes,” he said in an interview at a bustling cafe in Eagle River.

Like Jackson, McCarty said he would seek to use his time in the Legislature to improve the state’s economy. The state’s infrastructure needs an upgrade, he said, from a western extension of the Alaska Railroad in the Interior to port development in Point MacKenzie and Seward.

“There’s places in the world that want to buy our resources, and if we can’t move it out of the state, then we’re failing ourselves,” he said.

Lone Democrat in race faces questions over legitimacy

Newly registered Democrat Lee Hammermeister is the only candidate aside from Merrick who said he would join a bipartisan coalition similar to what currently exists in the Senate. He cast himself as a moderate.

“Ideally, I’d like for everyone to be able to work on common ground legislation, and be able to find legislation that can meet all of our needs, and be able to make the sacrifices necessary for that to happen,” he said in an interview at an Eagle River real estate office.

But his campaign has had trouble getting off the ground, struggled to fundraise, and is facing questions over its legitimacy. The Alaska Beacon reported that Hammermeister co-hosted a fundraiser for conservative Eagle River Republican Rep. Jamie Allard in 2023, and that the president of a progressive group had accused him of being a “fake Democrat” seeking to siphon votes from Merrick.

Hammermeister said he was frustrated by the accusation and by the Alaska Democratic Party’s decision not to support his candidacy. He said he’s been reaching out to local Democrats and “trying to establish contact with the party for weeks and weeks,” to no avail.

“If the Alaska Democrat Party has abandoned the Democrat voters of this district, that means that I’m the last thing standing in the way of four Republicans getting into that seat,” Hammermeister said.

The Alaska Division of Elections is using a new tool this year in an attempt to avoid the kinds of ballot-counting problems that have occurred during previous elections.

Enclosed in the bright red and green paperwork bags sent to every remote polling station is a small, black tracking device that will allow workers to trace the location of each precinct’s ballots as they travel across the state and on to Juneau for final counting.

That’s an important change, because ballots have occasionally been delayed during their return voyage through the mail, causing elections officials to postpone certification.

Two years ago, ballots from seven rural precincts were so badly delayed during the special election to replace Rep. Don Young that they couldn’t be included in the second and third counts in the state’s first-ever ranked choice election.

“We’re hoping that with these tracking tags that we have in there, we can see if it’s an issue of the precinct workers not mailing it soon enough, or if it is sitting in one of the post offices,” said Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections.

“If we are able to find that it’s sitting in a post office, then the post office has been working closely with us. We meet with them regularly, and we would be able to track that down a lot quicker,” she said.

Ahead of the state’s Aug. 20 primary election, the trackers were included in packages sent to all 131 polling stations where ballots are still counted by hand on Election Day. The state has 402 polling stations altogether.

The trackers are based on cellphone service, so they don’t function in all parts of Alaska, but they’re a step above what was previously available.

Elections officials said the idea for the trackers came from Apple’s AirTag system, but Apple has a limit of 16 AirTags per user ID, which wasn’t workable, election workers said.

That meant searching for a different commercial provider. The testing process wasn’t finished in time for the 2022 election, which delayed implementation until this year.

Ahead of Alaska’s Aug. 20 primary election, incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola continues to hold a fundraising advantage against her 11 competitors, new filings with the Federal Elections Commission show.

As of July 31, Peltola’s campaign had $2.8 million in cash on hand, compared to $317,617 held by Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and $172,548 held by fellow Republican challenger Nick Begich.

No other candidate reported holding any cash on hand.

Under Alaska’s election system, the four top vote-getters in the August primary — regardless of party — advance to the general election in November.

In the November election, if one candidate has more than half the votes, they win on the first count. If no one has more than half the votes, ranked choice voting is used to determine the winner.

In 2022, Peltola twice defeated Begich, former Republican Gov. Sarah Palin and all other competitors.

This year, Begich has pledged to withdraw from the election if he finishes behind Dahlstrom in the primary, which he has said is aimed at consolidating support behind one Republican. Dahlstrom has not made a similar pledge, nor have other candidates, who would replace any withdrawn candidate.

Fundraising success is strongly correlated with electoral victory.

In 2022, almost 94% of U.S. House candidates who spent the most money on their race went on to win the election, according to statistics kept by the Center for Responsive Politics.

In this election cycle, Peltola’s campaign has reported raising more than $7.5 million. Begich’s campaign has raised almost $983,000, and Dahlstrom’s campaign has raised over $912,000.

Dahlstrom has secured the endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, but local Republican Party officials have generally endorsed Begich. The state party has thus far declined to pick a preferred candidate.

Voter turnout ahead of Alaska’s Aug. 20 primary election is down from the past two elections but is running ahead of what it was in 2018 and 2016, the last two primaries without extraordinary factors in play.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic emergency encouraged Americans to vote by mail, and in 2022, Alaska’s primary election coincided with a special election for the state’s lone U.S. House seat.

Through Thursday, the Alaska Division of Elections had received 12,578 absentee ballot requests through mail, fax or email, according to figures posted on the division’s website. Additional requests are expected in coming days.

Two years ago, Alaskans requested more than 27,000 absentee ballots by mail, fax or email for the primary, and in 2020, the figure was more than 62,000 for the primary.

The Alaska Republican Party, Alaska Democratic Party and the Voter Participation Center have all sent unsolicited absentee ballot request forms to voters, according to the Division of Elections.

Though this year’s requests are lagging behind the past two primary elections, they’re running ahead of the 10,807 that were issued ahead of the 2018 primary or the 10,364 that were issued ahead of the 2016 primary.

Those figures do not include thousands more ballots that were cast at early voting sites or at places with in-person absentee voting.

According to the division, 2,100 Alaskans cast ballots at early voting sites between Aug. 5 and Aug. 7 this year.

In-person absentee voting, used at many rural Alaska voting locations, was disrupted last week by delays that prevented ballots from arriving in time for the Aug. 5 start of early voting.

All polling stations were open by Friday, the Alaska Division of Elections said.

James Boxrud, a spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, said on Friday that the agency “is committed to the secure, timely delivery of the nation’s Election Mail.”

“Regarding election materials shipped by the Alaska Division of Elections, we are aware those materials have all been delivered or are available for pickup by local election officials.  We continue working closely with state and local election authorities to resolve concerns ahead of the August 20th primary election,” he said by email.

Friday was the deadline for Alaskans to request that an absentee ballot be emailed to them, but voters can request an mailed ballot through Aug. 19.

A ballot must be postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted, and because much of Alaska’s mail is postmarked in either Anchorage or Juneau, voters are encouraged to have their ballot postmarked by hand inside a local post office.

Ballots will be counted if they are appropriately postmarked and arrive no later than 10 days after Election Day.

How Alaska votes

In Alaska’s election system, all candidates for an office, regardless of political party, are placed in the same primary election. Voters pick one candidate, and the four candidates with the most votes advance to the general election.

In the general election, voters are asked to rank the candidates in order of preference, one through four, with a fifth option for a write-in, if wanted.

If a candidate receives more than half of the first-preference votes, they win.

If no one receives more than half of the first-preference votes, the lowest finisher is eliminated, and voters who picked that candidate have their votes go for their second preference.

The elimination process continues until one candidate has more than half of the remaining votes.

Presidential elections do not have a top-four primary. Voters in November may be asked to rank more than four candidates for president.

Correction: Friday was the deadline to request that an absentee ballot by mail, but voters can request an emailed ballot through Aug. 19. 

Early voting opened Monday for Alaska’s Aug. 20 primary election, but ballots headed to many rural Alaska polling locations failed to arrive in time due to delays in the mail, the director of the Alaska Division of Elections said Wednesday.

That’s left some rural voters waiting to cast their ballots, and the delay has caused some Democrats to cry foul.

Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, the official in charge of the elections division, is running as a Republican candidate in the U.S. House race, seeking to defeat Democratic incumbent Mary Peltola.

Peltola is Alaska Native, and in her 2022 campaigns for office, she earned a significant amount of support from the state’s rural Native villages.

Robyn Burke is a Democratic candidate for the Alaska state House and tried to vote on Tuesday in Utqiagvik because she’ll be traveling on the primary election day.

She went to an early voting site, “and they handed me an absentee ballot application. Like to request a mail-in ballot. And I said, ‘Do you not have absentee ballots?’”

As it turned out, they did not — and neither did over a dozen other rural towns.

Burke posted about the issue on social media, which drew further comments from voters who had been likewise affected.

Alaska has only a handful of true early voting sites that are set up like Election Day polling places. In smaller communities, the state distributes blank absentee ballots and allows voters to cast “absentee in person” votes that are then mailed through the normal absentee ballot process.

In places where mail delivery is often slow, it’s frequently a faster way to vote before Election Day.

But this year, some absentee ballot packages were delayed getting to their final destination. In Bethel, ballots didn’t arrive until Tuesday afternoon. In Utqiagvik and Kotzebue, they arrived Wednesday.

Altogether, eight communities didn’t receive their packages until Monday, nine got them on Tuesday, and as of Wednesday afternoon, 14 communities were still waiting for their ballots, said Carol Beecher, the division director.

That figure changed throughout the day as more information arrived.

In some cases, the delays were due to bad weather. In others, the person designated to pick up the mail from the airport wasn’t answering the phone.

Among the affected towns and villages were Atka, Nikolski and Akutan in the Aleutians, Sand Point on the Alaska Peninsula, and Shaktoolik and Koyuk on the western coast.

Burke, who’s previously voiced concern about voting access in rural Alaska, said she’s concerned by the delays.

“A large part of Mary Peltola’s voting base is Alaska Native, but we don’t have the ability to vote, or the timeline that we have to vote is shortened. With people being turned away, who knows if they’ll go back?” she said.

Lindsay Kavanaugh, director of the Alaska Democratic Party, said she also saw Burke’s comments and that the issue is Dahlstrom’s responsibility.

“If she is unable to put in the work to ensure eligible voters are able to cast a ballot no matter where they reside in the state, one can easily conclude she will not be an effective advocate in Congress, especially not for rural Alaskans,” Kavanaugh said.

Dahlstrom’s campaign declined to comment on the issue. Beecher, a Dahlstrom appointee, said by email that nothing untoward is happening.

“I can assure you that this had nothing to do with anything political. The (lieutenant governor) has delegated all election responsibilities and is not involved in the operations of the division. The delays are due to mailing issues, and some of the challenges we encounter with these remote locations,” she said.

Back in 2006, Alaska voters passed a ballot initiative in a landslide. In most cases, it allowed campaign donations of no more than $500 per candidate per year. But those days are long gone, said former attorney general Bruce Botelho.

“There are no limits at the moment,” Botelho said in an interview.

Alaska used to have some of the strictest campaign spending laws in the country. And Botelho is part of an effort trying to reimpose caps on how much Alaska state candidates can raise as they run for governor, state House or state Senate. But since 2021, thanks to a court decision, Alaska has been one of only about a dozen states with no limits on individual donations, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The case that led to no limits

In 2015, a group of Republican donors and a local party group challenged the limits, saying $500 was far too low. Attorneys said the low cap gave an unfair advantage to both incumbents and candidates who were themselves independently wealthy. They said the laws violated the First Amendment.

A district judge initially upheld the $500 cap. Then, two years later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals weighed in. It threw out a law restricting out-of-state donors to no more than $3,000 in campaign donations, but it left the rest of the limits in place.

The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019. The justices told the Ninth Circuit to, essentially, try again — but that this time, the circuit judges should consider that the high court had thrown out similarly low limits in Vermont in 2006, and that the lowest limits the court had allowed were about 60% higher than Alaska’s after accounting for inflation. In light of the prior precedent, the Ninth Circuit struck down Alaska’s campaign limits in 2021.

That “meant that in 2022, that election cycle, and again this year, there are no limits on how much an individual can contribute to any race,” Botelho said.

The Dunleavy administration declined to appeal the 2-1 Ninth Circuit decision. A Department of Law spokesperson said it wasn’t worth the money or the risk.

A push to cap donations

Ever since, Alaska’s no-limits system has allowed deep-pocketed donors can exercise outsize influence, said Marina Pino with the Brennan Center for Justice, which defended the state’s campaign finance restrictions in court.

“There’s a growing disconnect between the average citizen and elected officials, and that’s fueled by a system that really stacks the deck in favor of a small number of deep-pocketed donors,” she said.

That’s a position Botelho shares, he said. He’s cosponsoring a ballot initiative campaign called Citizens Against Money in Politics.

The limits would be higher — $2,000 per candidate per election cycle, with higher limits for group donations and donations to a gubernatorial ticket, plus periodic adjustments for inflation — and that would make them more likely to survive court scrutiny, Botelho said.

“Our effort here is basically to even the playing field — to make clear that people of modest means should have the same voice as someone who can write a check for $250,000,” Botelho said.

In the meantime, though, some donors and candidates are making use of Alaska’s no-limits system.

Deep-pocketed donors give big

By the end of July, at least five state candidates for state House and Senate had reported contributions of $10,000 or more from a single donor, according to data aggregator OpenSecrets. That’s two independents, two Republicans and one Democrat, according to a candidate list from the Division of Elections.

Anchorage attorney Robin Brena donated a total of more than $30,000 to two candidates hoping to represent neighboring districts in Anchorage, including independent Nick Moe and Democrat Denny Wells. Wells said in a text message that he had signed the ballot initiative petition and would support reimposing campaign donation caps if elected to the Legislature.

For his part, Moe said in a phone interview that he supports restoring campaign limits and had also signed the ballot initiative petition — but for now, he said, he’d “use the tools at his disposal.”

“It’s incredibly challenging to have our voice heard as Alaskans when we deal with a political system that literally has hundreds of millions of dollars spent by outside of Alaska corporations to influence our political process,” Moe said.

Moe said he wouldn’t take a big donation from out of state and that most of his donations come from small-dollar donors, but said he was proud to have “an Alaskan like Brena supporting my campaign.”

Anchorage independent Rep. Alyse Galvin, who received a $30,000 contribution from a California man whom she said had served as a “surrogate parent” since her middle school years, said in a phone interview that she agreed with the push to limit campaign contributions. She said she’s gathering signatures for the ballot initiative.

“I’m very vocal about this, because I think that it’s an area that is going to level the playing field, if you will, to make sure that everybody feels like they can run for office,” she said.

Robert Yundt, who reported a $10,000 contribution from the owner of a Mat-Su construction company toward his effort to unseat fellow Wasilla Republican David Wilson in the state Senate, did not return a request for comment.

Some say limits won’t help

But some are skeptical that setting limits on campaign contributions would, in fact, level the playing field.

After all, no state ballot initiative can invalidate the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United, which allows independent groups like super PACs to raise and spend unlimited amounts of cash on campaigns as a matter of free speech.

That’s the view of Jared Goecker, who’s mounting a conservative challenge to Republican incumbent Kelly Merrick for a chance to represent Eagle River in the Alaska Senate. His campaign banked a $28,000 contribution from his brother, a real estate agent. (Goecker said a second $28,000 contribution from Jamin Goecker’s LLC, which is listed in campaign finance reports, was a clerical error he had cleared with regulators.)

The fact that Citizens United remains the law of the land means that no state limit on campaign spending would truly get money out of politics, Goecker said.

“You’re going to have local candidates trying to make a run if they see an issue in their local community, trying to make a difference, and then they’ll get completely steamrolled by the dark money pouring in through the PAC,” he said by phone.

And there’s some evidence that the current lack of campaign caps means candidates, rather than outside groups, are able to raise more money for their cause. For instance, in 2018, while Alaska’s campaign limits were still in place, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s brother and a sport fishing advocate put more than $700,000 into an independent expenditure group seeking to elect Dunleavy that was barred from coordinating with the candidate. But in 2022, when the limits were eliminated, Dunleavy and other candidates for governor themselves raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars, including from some of the same donors. Dunleavy has said he supports the no-limits system as long as candidates disclose their donors.

Botelho, the former AG who wants to reimpose limits, acknowledged that the ballot initiative wouldn’t be able to limit spending by independent expenditure groups, but he said they’re only a factor in a small number of races.

“To the extent they play in state and local politics, it’s usually at the gubernatorial level, or, in the case of Anchorage, in particular, the mayoral races,” Botelho said.

For now, organizers with the ballot initiative campaign say they’re racing to meet a mid-September deadline to submit enough signatures to get the initiative on the primary ballot in 2026. A volunteer coordinator with the initiative campaign, Jus Tavcar, said by text message that as of early August, the campaign had met about 60% of its goal.

And if the initiative does make the ballot, Botelho said he’s optimistic that just as they did two decades earlier, Alaskans would vote to support it.