Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has made a career of working across the political aisle, endorsed a no vote on Ballot Measure 2, the initiative that would repeal Alaska’s open primary system and return the state to partisan primaries.
“As Alaskans, we value our independence, that’s why I’m voting no on Ballot Measure 2,” she says, highlighting that a majority of Alaska voters don’t belong to any political party. “Ballot Measure 2 limits our freedom to vote for the best candidate, regardless of party.”
Murkowski made the endorsement in a television ad by the No on 2 campaign that began playing over the weekend, adding to an already long list. The Alaska Federation of Natives, several politicians and nearly two dozen labor unions have also sided with “no.”
Alaska voters adopted open primaries and ranked-choice voting in 2020 as part of a voter initiative to limit dark money spending in candidate races. It went into effect in 2022, opening the state’s primary system to one where the top four finishers advance to the general regardless of party affiliation. The general elections are then conducted with ranked-choice voting to ensure similar candidates don’t play spoiler to each other and the winner has more than 50% of the vote.
In 2022, many moderate Republicans found success with the system in districts that would have once eliminated them in the semi-closed partisan primary system. When those races were put to the entire district rather than just Republican primary voters, voters in many long-time Republican districts opted for the more moderate option.
On the state level, that also included Murkowski, who fended off a far-right Republican challenger in Kelly Tshibaka thanks to ranked-choice voting. While Murkowski led the race in every round of ranked-choice voting, she eventually secured 53% of the vote once Democrat Pat Chesbro was eliminated and her nearly 30,000 votes were redistributed.
Those results have fueled a right-wing backlash against the system, which culminated in the voter initiative to repeal it and return to semi-closed partisan primaries. Several Republicans have since conceded that they prefer the old system because it made it easier for Republican primary voters to steer the representation of the entire district.
While the Republican repeal effort initially seemed to have the upper hand, it has since been overwhelmed by the opposition, which has outraised and outspent the group by several orders of magnitude. According to recent disclosure reports, the Yes on 2 group has raised $117,875.44, while the No on 2 group has raised nearly $12.3 million.
The headaches for the repeal effort don’t end there.
Last week, Alaska campaign finance regulators recommended another hefty set of fines for the groups pushing to repeal RCV, finding that they ignored previous orders to fix glaring errors in their past reports. The $85,000 fines come on top of nearly $100,000 levied against the groups earlier this year for a scheme to filter a single large contribution through a fake church to make it look like the group had broader support than it did.
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.
