Legislation aimed at cleaning up voter rolls that its sponsor says are “overinflated” passed the Alaska House on Friday with bipartisan support.
The legislation would reduce the time required to remove someone from the state’s voter rolls from eight years to six years. It’s an effort to trim the state’s voter rolls, which currently have more people registered than are estimated to live in the state, thanks in large part to the state’s transient nature.
Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance, who crafted House Bill 129 as the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said the status of the voter rolls invites people to question the legitimacy of the state’s elections.
“The foundation of secure and trustworthy elections begins with accurate voter rolls,” she said. “Overregistering voters makes our election system inaccurate and vulnerable to the actions of bad actors. Compromised data invites those with nefarious intent to exploit inactive voters and invites those who do not live in Alaska to influence our elections.”
That hasn’t happened in Alaska, though one woman was charged with voting in both Alaska and Florida during the 2020 elections. The legislation also requires notification if voters’ information was affected by a data breach, like the one that happened in 2020 but wasn’t reported until after the election.
As for the voter rolls, the legislation would mark voters “inactive” if they haven’t participated in political activities like voting or signing an initiative for two years. They’ll be sent a letter and given 45 days to respond to stay active. During that inactive status, people can still vote but will have to go through additional steps to vote a question ballot, which, if accepted, will return them to active status. If they don’t participate in two general elections over four years, that’ll trigger removal from the voter rolls.
Notably, in a time of partisan distrust over elections, the legislation found broad support from Democrats and independents. Rep. Andrew Gray, an Anchorage Democrat who got a firsthand view of the legislation as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, supported the bill, calling it “commonsense.”
House Minority Leader Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage, called the measure “a reasonable cleanup” that recognizes the transient nature of Alaska’s population but stressed that his support wasn’t driven by concerns with the legitimacy of past elections.
“In my view, HB129 has absolutely nothing to do with prior elections to the extent that there is a lack of confidence around our elections or concerns over the voter rolls,” he said. “I’d just like to remind folks we have very secure elections here in Alaska and throughout the United States, and I think we can have a lot of faith and confidence in that.”
Still, not all legislators were convinced that the legislation was a good idea.
Several worried that the legislation would simply put up additional roadblocks to voting. Rep. Sara Hannan, D-Juneau, pointed out that there are many places in state law where you don’t have to be living in Alaska to be considered a resident, such as military and students, as long as they have an intent to return. If legislators were truly interested in matching the voter rolls to the population estimates, she said, they needed to be looking at those exemptions. She said the process would just discourage some.
“Sometimes people say, ‘Well, they can vote a questioned ballot.’ To many people being told that will simply turn them away at the door,” she said. “To get more people in elections, we don’t purge their names; we encourage participation.”
Others worried that the window to notify people that their voter registration would become inactive is too short for people living in rural Alaska, where mail speed and internet connectivity may delay a response. Sponsors said the 45-day window already accounted for that.
The final vote on the measure was 33-6. Rep. Hannan was joined by Reps. Andy Josephson (D-Anchorage), Zack Fields (D-Anchorage), Alyse Galvin (I-Anchorage), Donna Mears (D-Anchorage), and CJ McCormick (D-Bethel) in voting against the bill.
The bill now heads to the Senate for consideration.
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.
