The Alaska Legislature was poised to override another one of Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s vetoes this morning, but Southeast Alaska’s two Republicans legislators flip-flopped on the measure, voting against a bill they supported just weeks ago.
The vote comes amid an intense Republican pressure campaign driven largely by fears that easing barriers for rural voters would hurt conservatives at the polls.
Sitka Republican Sen. Bert Stedman and Ketchikan Republican Rep. Jeremy Bynum both voted in favor of the election reform bill, Senate Bill 64, last month, but against overriding the veto — leaving lawmakers exactly two votes short of the 40 needed to enact the law, which would have enacted ballot tracking and curing ahead of the 2026 elections.
Neither Republican explained their decision to betray the legislation during the debate, though the fact that they both represent the same region was hard to overlook.
Other legislators suggested the governor was leveraging issues outside the elections bill.
“Alaskans have no interest in us starting all over again and having the football pulled away again. We’ve come too far to quit. Now that’s not happening. We have a chance right now,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat who helped craft the bill. “We’re not going to be leveraged over the gas line or capital projects for a common-sense bill that Alaskans are demanding. We’re not going to quit on the Alaskans who have sent us here to get the job done.”
His comment didn’t elicit a response from either Bynum or Stedman, but it did draw an angry objection from Rep. Dan Saddler — an Eagle River Republican and party diehard — who furiously complained that Wielechowski had violated the rules by suggesting that Dunleavy and his supporters had “questionable motives.”
Whatever non-questionable motives Republicans had were largely left a mystery. Few Republicans spoke to the bill, and at least one repeated a flat falsehood about the bill.
Senate Bill 64 was the product of lengthy negotiations between the bipartisan majorties’ Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans and a handful of minority Republicans and seeks a narrow middle ground of acceptable changes. It didn’t tread into the controversial corners of election reform — like repealing automatic registration, enacting strict ID requirements or setting up drop boxes — but included measures like ballot curing, tracking, and voter roll maintenance. Those were all things they said would make a meaningful difference in reducing barriers for legal voters and improving election integrity.
SB 64 has faced bitter pushback from the Alaska Republican Party machine, whose pundits argued that easing barriers that have historically prevented Alaskans living in rural communities from voting would ultimately hurt Republicans’ chances of winning.
As GOP writer Suzanne Downing wrote while rallying opposition to the bill, the concerns centered on the rural Alaska-focused provisions, such as a liaison whose job it would be to ensure rural polling places open on election day, would “tilt the playing field to left field” and “institutionalize new layers of influence for rural Alaska in the election process.”
While Dunleavy didn’t address those claims directly — in fact, he didn’t touch on any provisions aimed specifically at helping rural Alaskans vote — it wouldn’t be the first time that Alaska Republicans have put electoral outcomes ahead of policy.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Republicans who held the House Majority bragged they had killed an election bill because they worried it would have helped U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, an Alaska Native and Democrat, win re-election.
But not every single Republican viewed it that way – just enough to sustain the veto.
Several conservative Republicans who had worked on the bill recognized that it was narrowly tailored and did more good, especially in areas they cared about, than harm.
Big Lake Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe, one of the chamber’s most conservative members, spoke in passioned defense of the bill on Monday. He cited a dozen concrete events and issues in the last five years that would have been addressed by the provisions of Senate Bill 64, noting that polling locations haven’t opened on time in rural communities, that some 735 people had ballots in the 2024 election could have been cured and that complaints about the slow and vague reporting of results would also have been addressed.
He followed up each group with an apology that SB 64 hadn’t been in place then and that, if the veto stood, would still be in place for the 2026 election and beyond.
“I voted for this bill. I fought for this bill. These apologies are not rhetorical. Every one of them is grounded in a specific provision of the enrolled bill or a documented failure of this process,” he said. “Every one of them represents a real Alaskan who will be worse off because this veto stands. The status quo is not neutral.”
More: Extreme-right Republican takes nasty friendly fire over support for bipartisan election bill
Some, but not all, of those Republicans faced vile personal attacks for their votes, like Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance, who was accused by Downing of voting for the bill because Wielechowski made her “feel pretty.” Vance, the lone minority Republican woman to split from the bill, unsurprisingly, was attacked the most by Republican pundits.
On Monday, she said none of it has changed her position on the bill.
“Election integrity and the sovereign voice of the people are a passion of mine. I would not be risking everything. I would not be taking the impunity, the accusations, the rumors, the threats and the bullying if I did not firmly believe in every Alaskan’s right to vote and to be counted. This is fundamental, as Americans,” she said. “When we start measuring policy based on outcomes instead of to the voter, we’re not exercising the trust in government. We’re playing politics. That’s not what I came here to do.”
Other Republicans, like Tok Republican Sen. Mike Cronk, whose mostly rural district is the largest state legislative district in the country, also stuck with their vote on the override, citing personal experiences with elections in rural communities.
“Has anybody ever been out to rural Alaska? Have you lived there? Have you experienced an election there? Because I think a lot of people are talking about that who haven’t been out there,” he said. “I represent a third of the state, many, many villages, some on the road, some on the river, some fly in. We obviously do have a problem sometimes in elections.”
For Cronk, the rural liaison and paid postage were common-sense solutions to long-standing problems that barred people in rural areas from having their voices heard. He got choked up talking about his dad, whose only option is to vote by mail, and asked if it was fair that his vote was rejected for a paperwork error.
He also skewered other Republicans for putting politics ahead of that.
“If I lose an election because a little old lady in Arctic Village had to cure her ballot, and that one ballot cost me my election, so be it,” he said. “Aren’t we here to make sure every vote counts? So I am going to vote to override this veto, and I think others should too, because it actually helps our elections in Alaska. It’s not a Republican bill, it’s not a Democrat bill, it’s an Alaskan bill.”
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.
