Did Alaska’s election officials give special treatment to a right-wing voter initiative to repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system?
The election system’s backers made that argument in front of the Alaska Supreme Court on Thursday, arguing that the Division of Elections bent or ignored state law and regulations when it gave Alaskans for Honest Elections, a right-wing group that has racked up campaign finance violations, to correct 60 signature booklets that had been submitted with invalid certifications from a notary whose commission had expired.
Watch on Gavel Alaska: La Quen Naay Elizabeth Medicine Crow, Amber Lee, and Kevin McGee v. State of Alaska, Division of Elections
The group eventually corrected and returned the invalid certifications, but not until the deadline for the initiative to appear on the ballot had passed.
Attorney Scott Kendall, a longtime backer of the election system, represented the group of citizens challenging the state’s approval of the initiative. He said a strict reading of the state’s laws and regulations should have disqualified the initiative, and a Superior Court judge was wrong to give the state flexibility to ignore the rules.
He warned that flexibility has been applied so inconsistently that it raises the specter of political interference, noting that other booklets were thrown out over the same problem the 60 corrected booklets had.
“To give the Division that much latitude could be decisive. It was decisive in this case,”
he said. “So, you have a division that maybe they’ll bend over backward for a particular petition, maybe they’ll just follow (the regulations) and disqualify it. We can’t allow the Division of Elections to have that kind of latitude.”
While the invalidly certified petition booklets would have been grounds for rejecting the initiative in past years, the state argues that more recent changes gave the Division of Elections broad flexibility to decide when and if signature petitions can be corrected after submission. State attorney Kimber Rogers told the court that what mattered was that the state had been “diligent” about working with the sponsors. However, she acknowledged that very little of the Division of Elections’ correction policy had been spelled out.
“We don’t really know what the division’s practice was at the timeframe,” she said when questioned about a Division of Elections brochure that said initiative sponsors cannot fix problems with their initiatives after submission.
What should have happened is less clear. Kendall argued for a strict application of deadlines that would create a very narrow window to catch and fix errors. The justices did not seem particularly convinced that such a narrow window was intended, a position they appeared to hold across much of the technical arguments.
As some justices reiterated during the questions, the Alaska Supreme Court has traditionally favored letting such political matters go to the voters. While candidates were disqualified for completing paperwork 10 minutes after the filing deadline, the justices noted a significant difference between a single candidate and the tens of thousands of people who had signed an initiative.
Still, the justices seemed keenly interested in the allegations that the Division of Elections had acted unfairly.
“It seems like a lot of mush in there,” said Chief Justice Pete Maassen of the state’s process for correcting errors with initiative petitions.
The outcome of the case has been hotly watched. The 2022 elections were the first to use the new system, and it saw broad success for moderate and centrist candidates in districts that had once reliably produced conservative Republicans more aligned with the party.
The state’s seemingly favorable treatment of the initiative comes after the Division of Elections, under Republican leadership, has been caught meddling with several progressive-led efforts, such as an initiative to raise oil and gas taxes and the attempted recall of Gov. Mike Dunleavy. The Alaska Supreme Court sided against the state in both cases, finding that it had wrongly tipped the scales.
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.
