Chilly weather and a tight connection were nothing for the Alaska-based flight attendants who gathered outside U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan’s Anchorage office on Friday to protest his support of the Republican efforts to upend how Americans vote.
About a dozen flight attendants — who work mostly for Alaska Airlines and its subsidiaries, with careers that ranged from a few years to several decades — warned the harsh restrictions contained in the Republicans’ SAVE Act would make it harder to vote. The event was organized by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA.
Rebecca Owens said the SAVE Act — which contains strict ID requirements that would make it hard for people who’ve changed their names, such as married women or trans people, to register — is an attack on the groups the union has long represented.
“This disproportionately affects flight attendants in a litany of ways, one being it’s a heavy, female-dominated work group, and you know that affects women who changed their names,” she said. “We also travel for work, right? So we can’t pop over during lunch break to vote because of our unpredictable schedules. We rely on mail-in voting. There are already so many barriers to voting, we don’t need to be adding more.”
Owens said she and other flight attendants have reached out to Sullivan’s office to request meetings to explain their concerns about the bill, which he has supported despite conceding that the voter fraud it’s ostensibly trying to prevent is exceedingly rare in Alaska. She said Sullivan’s office hasn’t declined the meeting requests; they’ve been ignored.
While the SAVE Act is likely dead under the current Senate rules — short of the 60 votes it needs to clear the Senate’s filibuster — she said Sullivan’s support is just one of his many affronts to working-class people. She noted he’s voted against gender-affirming care and reproductive rights, and has supported anti-union causes.
“He’s anti-labor, anti-women and anti-everyone,” she said. “We’re out here asking him to not make it hard for us to vote … The audacity that we have to be out here saying ‘Don’t make it harder for us to vote’ is ridiculous.”
Owens and other flight attendants said they were also concerned about what the ID requirements would do to every Alaskan, noting that the bill’s in-person registration requirements would force many to undertake costly travel to exercise their right to vote.
They also worried about the ongoing shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which has seen TSA agents work without pay for more than two months, and its impact on airport safety. Owens added that she’s concerned DHS funding could be leveraged to advance the SAVE Act despite it lacking the necessary votes.
For Maki Bogart, a flight attendant with Alaska Airlines, Sullivan’s support for the SAVE Act is part and parcel of his efforts to appeal to elites, entrenching their control.
“Sullivan is doing what he can to garner favor in what he thinks is the ruling class,” she said, “but I think that they’re all out of touch because they forget the power is with the people.”
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.
