A new lawsuit accuses the Alaska Division of Elections of giving special treatment to the conservative initiative group seeking to repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system.
The state recently approved the ballot initiative by Alaskans for Honest Elections but, as the lawsuit alleges, only after the state allowed the group to fix signature booklets well after the deadline to submit them. The lawsuit argues neither the curing process nor the post-deadline fixes are allowed under state law and should be grounds to deny the initiative.
The lawsuit, which was filed by ranked-choice advocate Scott Kendall on behalf of three voters, also alleges that Alaskans for Honest Elections violated the law while collecting signatures when their gatherers left signature booklets unattended.
Ranked-choice voting in Alaska, first used in 2022, has been credited with creating a political atmosphere that’s more friendly to moderate and centrist candidates who can broadly appeal to voters. However, it has rankled far-right conservatives, who argue that the loss of the semi-closed partisan primaries has undermined their ability to elect far-right candidates.
The lawsuit names Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, the Division of Elections, and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstom — whose job as lieutenant governor includes overseeing elections — as defendants.
Alaskans for Honest Elections, the initiative group at the center of the issue, has been the subject of numerous campaign finance complaints. These complaints allege that the group used a fraudulent church to hide its finances and failed to report its activities accurately. The group is currently appealing nearly $100,000 in fines imposed by campaign regulators.
During the course of those complaints, though, it was revealed that the group was having trouble hitting the benchmarks necessary to certify the initiative. Under state law, initiative groups must gather enough signatures to equal 10% of the turnout from the previous election and 7% of the turnout from 30 of 40 House districts, which the group conceded it was struggling to meet.
According to the new lawsuit, their problems continued into the submission of their signatures.
The Division of Elections declined to count signatures in 61 of the booklets submitted by the group because one was incorrectly dated, and the rest were notarized by a person who wasn’t a certified notary at the time.
The lawsuit argues that the state broke the law when it returned the defective initiative booklets to the group, allowing them to fix the notarizations. Such a fix isn’t allowed in state law, the lawsuit argues, adding that the booklets weren’t even returned until well after the deadline for the initiative to be submitted.
“No statute or regulation allows the sponsors to have any subsequent contact with individual petition booklets, including retrieving or altering them in any way, after the petition booklets are filed with the Division,” argues the lawsuit. “By allowing the Sponsors to retrieve 61 individual petition booklets to supplement them and cure their defects, re-file these booklets weeks later, but then nonetheless counting the signatures in those booklets, the Defendants exceeded their power and violated (state election laws).”
It also points out that other places in state law specifically allow a curing process, but not the initiative section. It goes on to note that the Alaska Legislature specifically repealed the process to allow initiative curing back in 1998.
The lawsuit argues that if the state had properly rejected the improperly notarized signature booklets or if the unattended ballots were rejected, the effort would have failed to collect enough signatures to get the issue on a 2024 ballot.
Now, the group is asking the court to make that determination, finding the state violated the law and blocking the initiative from appearing on the ballot.
The three voters involved in the lawsuit are Elizabeth Medicine Crow, the former president of the First Alaskans Institute; Anchorage political consultant Amber Lee; and Kevin McGee, the former president of the NAACP in Anchorage.
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.