The New York Times recently dropped into Alaska to report on what it called “an experiment that feels both inevitable and impossibly futuristic,” as the city of Anchorage is turning on the spigot for online voting. All Anchorage voters will be able to cast their votes by phone, the article reports, in a turnout-boosting effort that one expert warns Times readers couldn’t come “at a worse time in American history.”
It’s not just a stunning change, but stunning that it has escaped the notice of every Alaska-based media outlet — even the right-wing ones that would pounce on this sort of thing.
That’s because the Times may have gotten out over its skis.
Anchorage Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz put out a lengthy statement on Wednesday afternoon responding to the story and explaining that, no, the city isn’t turning to the brave new world of phone-first elections. Instead, she explained the option the Times is framing as the broad implementation of by-phone voting is simply an evolution of a long-standing policy that allows voters overseas, deployed or otherwise unable to vote by mail to cast a vote.
Since Anchorage turned on by-mail elections in 2018, the city has allowed people to cast ballots via email and fax. The state has also long offered similar options, allowing voters to receive their ballots by email or fax (which they must return by paper mail or fax). In both cases, it requires voters to jump through additional hoops.
What’s new as of the 2025 elections earlier this year is that the city has launched a secure online voting portal — accessible on any internet-connected device, including phones — as a more secure alternative to email and fax.
“Readers of the New York Times have been led to believe the MOA Elections team has embarked on some novel, unsecure agenda on the bleeding edge of integrity in local elections. Rest assured, municipal voters: the article is an egregious misrepresentation of MOA Elections,” Heinz said in a statement. “The article claims a new ‘experiment’ will allow all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones. This is factually inaccurate. There are no changes to the options for voters to cast their ballots in the upcoming 2026 Regular Municipal Election.”
According to Heinz, these alternative voting methods have been rarely used, with an average of about 200 voters requesting electronic voting each election. That trend continued in 2025, with a majority of such voters opting to use the new online portal.
“In the 2025 Regular Municipal Election, we offered those voters the option to vote by secure document portal in addition to the options to vote by email and by fax,” Heinz said. “Of the 60,455 total ballots cast in the 2025 Regular Municipal Election, 147 voters voted electronically and the majority — 136 voters — chose to vote via the secure document portal.”
So while phone-focused voting could be a boost to turn out, that’s not what’s going on in Anchorage.
Instead, as Anchorage Election Administrator Liz Edward told the Times, it’s simply an effort to improve the convenience and security of an existing voting option for people away from home to participate in the democratic process.
“We have a high transient population — military, oil and gas, fishing, tourism — our people are always on the move,” she said. “And so we’ve been trying to make it even easier for them to vote and make it so you don’t really have an excuse not to vote anymore. … We actually got a lot of selfies of people on vacation saying, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’ Like, ‘We were able to vote from Spain.’ Or ‘Here’s a picture of us at some cathedral.’”
Not exactly the wild west of voting.
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 Bluesky.
