Originally published in The Alaska Memo.
Elections in our sparse and sprawling state have never really gone over without a hitch. Issues around staffing, communications and logistics have long been a headache, particularly for rural communities that face particularly acute issues with resources and neglect at varying levels of intentionality by urban-minded administrators.
Yet, things have seemed to take a particularly nasty turn under the umbrella of the Dunleavy administration — yes, elections are technically under the purview of his lieutenant governor, but so much is driven by the Department of Law there’s little separation in practice. Polling stations that open late or not at all have become a painfully regular occurrence; some voters have gotten the wrong ballots altogether, and other communities cast votes for them to never be counted.
And then there’s a litany of examples of the Division of Election officials putting a thumb on the scale of races, delivering decision after decision that seems to be crafted to give Republican candidates and conservative causes a boost.
Taken together, the state of elections in Alaska is the product of one part the result of Dunleavy’s compulsive destruction of Alaska’s administrative state, two parts an effort to bend the rules for their partisan advantage and a dash of incompetence, all wrapped up in the flimsiest legal arguments you’ll ever find. And for a party that pays a lot of lip service to the need to restore trust in elections, it’s hard to imagine a series of actions better designed to sow doubt than what the state has done leading up to this year’s elections.
It’s almost like a Trump-supporting election denier is running the show.
On the partisan end of things, elections under Dunleavy got off to an ominous start with his Division of Elections. Under former Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer, putting flimsy yet effective, time-wasting roadblocks up to the recall effort and it fiddled with the language of an initiative to raise oil taxes. Under Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, the state gave the effort to repeal the state’s open primary and ranked-choice voting system a convenient life raft when the initiative group got caught trying to turn in fraudulently notarized signature packets, ensuring otherwise fatal errors wouldn’t prevent the red-meat conservative issue from reaching the ballot.
With the advice of now-former-interim-attorney-general-and-now-current-counsel-to-Dunleavy Stephen Cox, in 2025, the state also acquiesced to the Trump administration’s attempts to collect voters’ private information to a degree that even Republican states like Idaho and West Virginia couldn’t stomach doing. (Since the Division of Elections handed over the data and signed onto a memorandum that gives the feds unprecedented involvement in determining who’s eligible to vote, 17 of the DOJ’s 30 lawsuits to access the information elsewhere have been dismissed).
Then there is the whole Dans Sullivan saga, where Dahlstrom launched her own conclusion-in-search-of-justification investigation of Dan J. Sullivan, with the division concoting a less-than-convincing case that he was a decoy — relying largely on the evidence like his use of the name “Dan” proffered by an attorney whose lawfirm helps religious groups escape responsibility for hiring sex offenders — and an even worse case that they had the actual legal mechanism to remove him even if they could prove he was.
While the Alaska Supreme Court ruled Dan J. Sullivan had to be on the ballot — pointing to the small issue of there not being any law or regulation saying the state could do what it did — it left open the question as to how he should appear on the ballot. And it shouldn’t shock you that the Division of Elections used that to their (Sullivan-backing Republicans’) advantage, listing Dan J. Sullivan in a frankly punitive manner. Continuing their insistence that it’s evident he’s a bad-faith candidate trying to confuse — an issue that they still have not been able to convincingly establish is something they can legally get involved in — officials argue they had no choice but to take totally unprecedented action by listing him as Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr. without his party affiliation, which would be Republican. The design of his name is one thing — and likely within the rules designed to minimize confusion — but the removal of his party affiliation, the sort of thing that falls under our First Amendment associational rights, is quite another.
The state argues those rights aren’t actually guaranteed because, well, they say so.
And, finally, the state has also been hastily disqualifying voters on what even they admit is based on “old data” from the DMV, resulting in something like a 700% increase in disqualifications. In total, the Division of Elections’ effort to “clean up” the voter rolls ahead of the 2026 election — seemingly an extension and, effectively, the implementation of Trump’s cruel attempts to make it harder to vote by fear mongering over illegal immigrants voting — has removed more than 3,000 voters this year. Infuriatingly, the Division of Elections seems to have known full well that the process was messy, inaccurate and likely to flag citizens as noncitizen voters. According to an excellent report by the Alaska Beacon, the disqualifications led to total voter enrollment declining, which is deeply unusual during an election year, and seems to be largely affecting voters who got a driver’s license as a noncitizen but have since become citizens and are in the window before they need to renew their driver’s license.
It’s a problem that the DMV even seemed to flag in a memo, outlining how the “non-routine request” of drivers’ citizenship shouldn’t be considered a formal determination of their current status, just their status when they got their license.
But that didn’t seem to stop Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, who told lawmakers this week that even though the results were “very concerning,” they had to heed the report and disqualify the voters (more of this flimsy legal justification). And, hey, she added, even if it caught people who can legally vote — which it most definitely did — then they can simply let the state know.
“It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote, but it’s a measure the division has to take to make sure that we only have citizens voting,” she said, seemingly without a hint of irony during a hearing that never did bring up her denialism around the 2020 election. “It is not an onerous request from the division to simply contact us and confirm, and that is what we have asked them to do. We don’t require paperwork. We’re not requiring documentation. Nothing like that.”
But according to folks who talked with the Beacon, that’s not at all the case.
Instead, they report difficulty getting ahold of anyone at the Division of Elections and that the voicemail boxes have been full. The state claims it sent letters to the effected voters, but several only found out when they checked their registration status on their own or by word of mouth. Those who have gone through the process of reversing the decision also told the Beacon that it wasn’t as easy as a simple call and they did, in fact, have to send in their naturalization papers.
Chris Waigl, a Fairbanks resident who got her license in 2019 and naturalized in 2025, told the Beacon that not only is it a problem about voting in the future, but it raises the spectre of legal consequences about votes they’ve already taken. And that’s not a hypothetical. Alaska is doggedly pursuing criminal charges against against several Whittier residents from American Samoa who registered to vote after being told by a local official that while they couldn’t vote for president, they could participate in local elections.
So, to be clear, thousands of Alaskans have been disqualified on knowingly shoddy, outdated data, and Beecher’s concern that it may have caught people who are fully within their rights to vote seems to be little more than a shrug, standing in stark contrast to her concern about the Dans.
To the non-GOP diehard lawmakers at this week’s hearing, the whole thing stinks, particularly around the treatment of the Dans and the decision to conceal his political affiliation on the ballot. After all, would there have been the same urgency had a Mary J. Peltola filed to run? Would they have hired an Outside attorney whose clients include the political party pushing the allegations of a fraud? Would they have so eadily trod on her associational rights? Legislators had their doubts.
“The intent is to support the voters and have a trusted, nonpartisan elections office, and the appearance is that this was partisan decision making,” said House State Affairs Committee chair Rep. Ashley Carrick, D-Fairbanks. “I don’t know if that decision would be made for every incumbent, and if so, I don’t know if voters would like there to be a bias for incumbents from the Division of Elections other than just listing someone as an incumbent.”
If they could incumbent, then why was erasing his party affiliation warranted?
“As far as the way that the ballot was designed, I’m certain that there could be many arguments about different ways that it could have been done — should have been done — but in the end, this was the decision that the division made under what we have the authority to do,” she said. “I understand your concerns, but in the end, this was a decision that we made.”
And if Dan J. Sullivan had a problem with his party affiliation being left off the ballot, she said, he could always sue.
Ah, yes, what a great and transparent way to run an election.
Oh, and then there was this, when the Division of Elections spokesperson got all handsy with the KTUU team, which has been hounding the whole issue in search of any reasonable basis for the decisions other than “Because we say so”:
They did not, in fact, get a response.
Stay tuned.
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.
