The roughly two-week timeline for determining the outcome of razor-thin races is nothing new in Alaska elections, but several close, high-profile races in recent years are pushing politicians in Juneau toward significant election reform during this legislative session.
On Tuesday, members of the bipartisan Senate Majority declared that faster election results will be a priority, although how exactly they plan to push legislation over the finish line and onto the governor’s desk for his signature wasn’t immediately clear.
The Senate’s bill, which might also include changes for updating voter rolls and nixing the requirenent for witness signatures on by-mail ballots, has yet to be introduced.
“The bill will address that issue of getting quicker (election) results,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, the Anchorage Democrat who chairs the Senate Rules Committee.
Then on Wednesday, Gov. Mike Dunleavy revealed his proposal, with his version of election reform, filed as HB 63, which would shorten the window for Alaskans to vote early in addition to a far shorter window for Alaskans to vote by mail.
Dunleavy’s legislation would cut off early voting five days before elections, which means closing polls during some of Alaska’s busiest voting days. Dunleavy also wants by-mail ballots to arrive either before or on Election Day rather than allowing the current 10 days after the election allowed for most by-mail ballots. Dunleavy’s proposal, in effect, would require Alaskans to mail in their ballots as much as a week or more before every election, a particularly high hurdle for rural Alaska and overseas voters.
“This bill is a necessary step to ensure the integrity and transparency of our election process while addressing Alaskans’ concerns about reliability,” Dunleavy claimed, echoing right-wing talking points that had erupted across the nation about post-2020 election so-called “reforms.”
In return for narrowing the window on widely used voting methods, the governor’s bill proposes that the state cover postage costs for all by-mail ballots and allow communities with fewer than 750 residents to conduct state elections completely by mail. That would include communities — virtually all in rural Alaska — where the state has sometimes failed to open polling places at all.
Read about rural Alaska’s many ongoing barriers to voting here: Closed voting centers are just the latest barrier for voters in rural Alaska
If these barriers are not enough, Dunleavy also proposes another voting barrier in his bill, repealing the 2016 voter-approved automatic voter registration law, which automatically registers and updates Alaska voters when they apply for their annual Alaska Permanent Fund dividend (unless they opt-out). The initiative-approved, 2016 measure has since seen an unprecedented surge in registered voters statewide. Nevertheless, critics on the right have been relentlessly attacking the increase in Alaska’s registered voters as bloating the voter rolls and thus rendering them inaccurate. Advocates call that criticism just another name for “voter suppression.” Besides a drop in the annual voter turnout percentages, it’s unclear what other problems the voter rolls have caused.
Dunleavy’s proposed election changes were panned by Michelle Sparck, an Alaska Native who, as director of Get Out the Native Vote (and a board member of The Alaska Current), has long advocated for increasing voter access in rural communities.
Rural Alaskans have faced unopened polling places, mailing errors, and a much higher rejection rate for their by-mail ballots than in Alaska’s urban locations and communities on Alaska’s road system. According to Sparck, Dunleavy’s changes would only lead to more unnecessary hurdles for rural voters, particularly with disruptions to rural mail service and frequent changes in election workers in isolated communities throughout rural Alaska.
“Voting-by-mail is still very tricky for rural precincts under a system fraught with personnel and/or weather challenges,” said Sparck. “Even up to Election Day, we were getting inquiries from former absentee voting officials as to where their ballots were for their community. It’s an extraordinary burden to place on rural voters when various forms of systemic failures add up to non-starters, delayed early voting, other access issues, as well as untoward rejection rates.”
While Sparck appreciates other election reform moves, such as proposals to allow the state to process votes earlier, she notes that the governor’s bill does not address the state’s witness signature requirement on by-mail ballots. Ostensibly an anti-fraud measure, she said, there is no process to actually cross-check the signatures. In fact, the state has conceded signature cross-checking has never been used to catch fraud, she said.
Instead, the meaningless and unscrutinized signature requirement has been a leading cause of rejected ballots in rural communities, according to reviews of several recent elections.
At the Senate Majority’s Tuesday news conference, Sen. Wielechowski called Alaska’s signature requirement on mail-in ballots “meaningless” and so must be tossed, especially because it disproportionately disenfranchises rural and military voters.
“This has caused the disqualification of 1,300 voters roughly in this past election and several thousand in previous elections. A huge percentage of these voters are military voters and people in rural Alaska,” he said. “In fact, we asked (the Division of Elections) during a State Affairs Committee hearing last year whether if somebody signed Mickey Mouse as a witness signature where they throw out the absentee ballot and they testified no, they wouldn’t. So, it’s this meaningless requirement that is on the books that is unfortunately causing votes to be thrown out.”
While the Senate advanced a measure to repeal the signature requirement last session, House Republicans narrowly defeated the measure after Kotzebue Republican Rep. Thomas Baker split from other rural legislators to vote against the bill, which many saw as a slap in the face of his rural Alaska constituents.
Incredibly, former House Speaker Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, later publicly admitted on a right-wing radio talk show that Republicans deliberately blocked the legislation because they believed counting more ballots from rural communities would help Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola in her re-election bid. The revelation laid bare far-right Republican assumptions that rural and Alaska Native voters are a monolithic bloc of Democratic voters despite evidence to the contrary. For example, Trump won House District 40, which was represented by Baker and covers the North Slope and Kotzebue, by about 10 points in 2024 after losing it in 2020.
Peltola ultimately lost to Republican Nick Begich III by about 8,000 votes.
Baker, who is from Kotzebue and was appointed by Dunleavy without ever facing voters for his Northern Alaska seat, was soundly defeated in the 2024 election by Democratic Rep. Robyn Niayuq Burke of Utqiagvik.
During his short tenure as a legislator, Baker created waves among his constituents, losing significant support from North Slope and Northwest Arctic voters after blocking a Dunleay veto override in 2024 on a crucial education bill that was killed by a single vote.
Baker also introduced a bill on subsistence in 2024 that triggered widespread blowback from, among others, NANA Regional Corp., Maniilaq Association, and Elders, a significant slight to a long-standing tradition of involving community members, especially on subsistence issues.
Baker’s resounding defeat at the ballot box in November 2024 helped pave the way for the state House’s razor-thin tripartite coalition along with promising election reform during this legislative session.
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.
