With the Legislature entering the final stretch of the 2023 regular legislative session, several bills that have laid dormant for much of session are getting new life.
One bill garnering a lot of attention—and a fair bit of fretting—is House Bill 4, far-right Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance’s bill to repeal the state’s ranked-choice voting system. After being ignored for the entirety of the legislative session, the bill popped up for a hearing in the House State Affairs Committee today that will not only be its first hearing of the session but will be a public hearing at that. Holding a public hearing at its first hearing is unusual, signaling to many that something may be up.
Alaska has conducted one cycle of elections under the new system—the special election to replace U.S. Rep. Don Young and the regular 2022 election—and far-right Republicans have hardly stopped complaining it’s the system’s fault that their chosen far-right candidates lost to moderates. It’s the system’s fault—not the fault of the candidates for being unable to appeal to Alaskans—as folks like U.S. Senate candidate Kelly Tshibaka launch campaigns to undo the system through the initiative process that’d ask Alaskans to repeal a system that they approved in 2020 but that would be put up to voters in 2024, leaving another election that will likely leave far-right candidates in the cold.
So, what are the chances of a legislative repeal?
Let’s be clear, the repeal of ranked-choice voting has almost zero chance of passing through the normal legislative process. The bipartisan Senate Majority and its moderate Republicans who thank the new system—specifically the open primary system where hard-right conservative voters are no longer in the driver’s seat of deciding what flavor of Republicans are sent to Juneau—for their victories have only signaled opposition to a repeal of the system. Anchorage Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel, who lost the seat in 2020 under the old system only to win it back in 2022, has been an outspoken supporter of the system.
That said, there’s always the possibility of some last-minute hijinks like the House attempting to staple the legislation onto a Senate bill in hopes it can sneak through.
Weeks before the Legislature even gaveled in, I had coffee with a political watcher who worried that the only real way that ranked-choice voting would be at risk in this legislative session would be some sort of tactic like that.
There are several rules in the Legislature that are designed to stop this kind of process, but rules only really matter if they’re enforced. One discourages legislators from running amendments that are just existing bills, but it can be sidestepped if no one objects or if the sponsor of the existing bill withdraws their legislation. The more important rule is the Alaska Constitution’s single-subject rule, which requires bills to be limited to a single subject. Again, though, it only matters if the rules are enforced and, really, if someone can be bothered to sue if it’s enacted.
And there’s plenty of room for creativity under a single subject.
In recent years we’ve seen bills relating to bars and breweries lumped into a contracting licensing bill, nail techs and veterinary inspectors share a bill and a load of bills combined into anything with a tangential relationship to the criminal justice system or the education system. Pretty much anything can be related to a board and commission if you squint hard enough.
In most of those cases, though, it takes a bit of agreement and negotiation from all sides. You get something you want (the passage of your bill) and I get something I want (the passage of my bill contained in your bill), but in the case of repealing Alaska’s election changes, there’s no upside for the many legislators who benefited from the open primary system.
For them, a return to the hyper-partisan semi-closed primary system would effectively be signing their own death sentence. The steps Alaska has made this session toward things like increased education funding and a defined benefit system for public employees would likely go out the window.
So, is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No.
But, then again, when has the likelihood of something ever stopped the Legislature?
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Twitter.