When more than 3,000 Alaska voters were flagged as potential non-citizens earlier this year, Alaska Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher told lawmakers last week that it was likely based on “old data” and “very concerning” — an instinct that proved to be correct.
But, the Trump donor who has refused to say whether the 2020 election was fair removed them anyway, insisting it was no big deal if a few citizens got swept up.
“It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote,” she said. “It is not an onerous request from the division to simply contact us and confirm. … We don’t require paperwork. We’re not requiring documentation. Nothing like that.”
Citizen voters wrongly caught up in the purge, however, report a very different experience.
Now, legislators are demanding answers.
The chairs of the House Judiciary and State Affairs committees, which hosted last week’s hearing, sent a letter demanding more information on the entire process, including the state’s claim that it sent affected voters letters and whether the Trump administration had any role in disqualifying voters. The letter sets a deadline for a response by Friday, though legislators have already struggled to get straight answers from the state.
“Alaskans deserve a straight answer, not two different stories from two different state agencies,” said House State Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks, in a prepared statement. “We’re simply asking for answers to the questions our constituents are asking.”
What Carrick’s referring to is a memo from the DMV — the source of the “old data” — that called the entire exchange of data that led to the disqualification of this many voters “non-routine,” contrary to Beecher’s claims that everything was, in fact, by the books.
According to the memo, the Division of Elections approached the DMV with a “non-routine” request to check the citizenship status of 15,200 voters, and the DMV simply cross-checked these records against its database, flagging anyone whose latest confirmed status was anything other than “Citizen.”
Interestingly, the data also comes with a caveat that shines a light on what happened and raises questions about why Beecher pushed ahead with the purge so close to the 2026 election.
The DMV memo bluntly explains that its citizenship data should not be relied upon to determine someone’s citizenship status because it is collected only when people apply for a license and updated only when they renew. Meaning that anyone who applied for a driver’s license as a non-citizen, then became a naturalized citizen but hasn’t had to renew their license, may have been wrongly flagged as a noncitizen because the DMV has “old data” that it knowingly doesn’t update.
Alaska driver’s licenses are valid for up to 8 years. About 1,000 Alaskans became naturalized each year during the last eight years, according to federal immigration data. This purge affected 3,048 people.
And that seems to be precisely what happened to Fairbanks resident Chris Waigl, who got a driver’s license in 2019 and became an American citizen in 2025, as well as several other people she contacted after learning her status was changed to “inactive – non citizen.” She told The Alaska Beacon that it was a shock, raising fears that the state may pursue legal actions against anyone caught up in the purge. She said she’s since resolved her registration, but that correcting the Division of Elections wasn’t nearly as easy as a phone call.
“They were able to correct it there and then after I sent in copies of my naturalization certificate with a date before my voter registration date,” she told The Alaska Beacon, noting that several others have had trouble getting anyone to answer the phone. “It’s just ridiculous.”
The DMV memo seems to have predicted precisely this.
It explains that the data it provided on voters’ citizenship was only a snapshot of when they last interacted with the DMV, basically just what they needed to determine what type of license to issue, and “not a formal determination of citizenship for other purposes.”
Why that massive caveat on the accuracy of the data was seemingly ignored by the Division of Elections, despite Beecher’s alleged misgivings, is something lawmakers want to better understand, especially against the backdrop of the Division of Elections bending or ignoring its own laws and regulations to give Republicans an advantage in the upcoming election. What laws was she relying upon? Under what legal authority did she have to access this information in the first place? What are the legal consequences someone faces if they don’t take the time to correct the Division of Elections errors? Did the Trump administration or his allies have a hand in making these decisions?
They’re questions that are becoming disturbingly frequent with the Alaska Division of Elections.
In fact, last week’s hearing was originally called to discuss the Division of Elections’ decision to bar a man named Dan Sullivan from running against U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan — a decision the Alaska Supreme Court overturned because Alaska doesn’t have any laws on the issue — and even then, it was held as a compromise after legislators issued a subpoena.
In the big picture, lawmakers are on high alert for hijinks out of the Division of Elections under the direction of Beecher and Republican Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom. The two handed over the state’s confidential voter roll — in likely violation of the Alaska Constitution’s stout privacy protections — and signed onto a sweeping agreement giving the Department of Justice unprecedented say in determining who’s allowed to vote.
The only other state to have acquiesced to the degree Alaska has is Texas. Most others, including several Republican-leaning states, have sued to protect the information, warning that the agreements would give unprecedented and unconstitutional control of elections to the federal government.
Rep. Andrew Gray, the Anchorage Democrat who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said that something about the state’s story isn’t adding up and it’s threatening potentially thousands of citizens’ voting rights.
“Right now the Division says this was routine, the DMV says it wasn’t, and 3,500 voters are caught in the middle,” he said. “We’re not going to let that stand unanswered.”
The letter
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.
