For the third time in the last four election cycles, Alaska’s election system will be on the ballot.
After voters approved the system in 2020 and narrowly rejected its repeal in 2024, a new and better-funded conservative effort is taking aim at the system, with one big difference. This year’s Ballot Measure 2 wouldn’t just return Alaska’s election system to the semi-closed partisan primaries of the past; it would also put voters back in the dark when it comes to some political spending.
That’s because rather than taking a scalpel to the voting system as the 2024 campaign did, the pro-Ballot Measure 2 campaign, Repeal Now, takes a shotgun approach to the 2020 election reforms, calling for a wholesale reset of the state’s election laws. Ballot Measure 2 wouldn’t just repeal open primaries and ranked-choice voting—a system that conservatives complain makes it harder for them to win—it would also repeal the state’s anti-dark money law that requires campaigns for governor and the Alaska Legislature to reveal the wealthy donors trying to influence Alaska’s elections.
That provision, passed as part of the 2020 election reforms, requires campaigns to report the “true source” of campaign contributions rather than masking it by filtering the money through a third-party group. Without that law, Alaskans would never have learned that tech billionaire Elon Musk put $1.5 million into the repeal effort.
But its impact on the state’s election system doesn’t end there.
Ballot Measure 2 would also revert the race for governor from a combined ticket with the lieutenant governor to separate races for each role, with party tickets decided through partisan primaries. And because of that change, the state’s newly approved campaign finance limits in the form of the primary ballot’s Ballot Measure 1 stand directly in Ballot Measure 2’s path.
Ballot Measure 1 won more than 70% of the vote, enacting a cap of $2,000 on how much individual donors can give per candidate per election starting after the 2026 elections. But because Ballot Measure 2 reverts the laws around the governor’s race, it would also repeal the new limits on contributions to candidates for governor and lieutenant governor.
That means that if Ballot Measure 2 is approved, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor could continue raising unlimited amounts of money directly from donors.
At the heart of it, Ballot Measure 2 is about how much control political parties should have over the candidates on the ballot.
Under the old, semi-closed partisan primary system, Republican candidates in safe Republican districts really only had to focus on winning the primary—which the Alaska Republican Party limits to Republicans and independent voters—because those districts would reliably elect the Republican candidate in the general election.
Supporters of the open primary and ranked-choice voting system argue that those primaries gave political parties and their hyper-engaged primary voters an outsized role in selecting candidates, thereby encouraging candidates to be more partisan. For many diehard Republicans, however, that partisanship isn’t exactly a bad thing, and several Republican opponents of open primaries and ranked-choice voting argue that voters would be better off if the parties had more control of picking candidates—pointing to the debut of a Petersburg man named Dan J. Sullivan running as a Republican against Republican US Sen. Dan S. Sullivan.
“Under Alaska’s old, closed primary, a same-name candidate could file against a sitting senator. But the system would decide his fate before November,” said Big Lake Republican Rep. Kevin McCabe in an op-ed. “He had two choices: beat the incumbent in the Republican primary, which almost never happens against a two-term senator with the party behind him, or lose and go home. The party was the filter. Democrats could not vote on the Republican ballot. One Republican name went to the general election.”
With the open primary system, several legislative races have taken shape that featured several kinds of Republicans, including moderates who may not have had much success with Republican primary voters. And in many of those cases, general election voters have opted for the moderates, who are often more likely to work alongside Democrats and independents in the Legislature.
That’s the case for Republicans like Anchorage Sen. Cathy Giessel, Kodiak Rep. Louise Stutes, Eagle River Sen. Kelly Merrick, and Nikiski Sen. Jesse Bjorkman, who have all fended off challengers backed by the Alaska Republican Party and have continued to caucus with the Legislature’s bipartisan coalitions.
McCabe, meanwhile, is facing his own moderate Republican challenger this year in former Alaska Wildlife Troopers head Doug Massie.
Ballot Measure 3
While Republicans hope Ballot Measure 2 will give them better control over elections in the future, Ballot Measure 3 appears to be aimed at driving conservatives to vote in this year’s election. That’s because the measure does, in effect, nothing more than rephrase the state’s existing voting requirements to be more explicitly against noncitizen voting, which is already banned in the state.
Ballot Measure 3, if approved, would just change the wording for Alaska’s voter requirements from:
“A person may vote at any election who is a citizen of the United States.”
To:
“Only a person who is a citizen of the United States may vote at any election.”
The measure is backed by former North Pole Republican Sen. John Coghill and former House Speaker Mike Chenault, who told the Anchorage Daily News that the measure was essentially about sending a message that Alaska doesn’t tolerate noncitizen voting, something that isn’t happening in Alaska.
While notable Alaska politicians are at the helm of Ballot Measure 3, the effort is an offshoot of Americans for Citizen Voting, a conservative political action committee pushing for similar measures throughout the country. Former Alaska journalist Stan Jones called out the connection in an op-ed last year, arguing that such “citizenship voting” measures “have been used as turnout engines and list-building operations — reliable ways to galvanize conservative voters, recruit volunteers and gather contact data.”
And he argued that it’s particularly impactful at a time when President Donald Trump continues to spread baseless claims of rampant voter fraud, and other red states have put similar measures on the ballot in an apparent bid to drive Republican turnout.
“Across the country, these initiatives rarely stand alone,” Jones wrote. “They serve to establish the narrative that elections are lax or vulnerable, even when they are not. That narrative then becomes the justification for downstream restrictions: stricter ID laws, new documentation burdens for naturalized citizens, more aggressive voter-roll purges and—especially relevant here—new hurdles for absentee and mail-in voters.”
To Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, the fact that the ballot measure “has no realistic impact on the current law at all” leaves it as little more than a mean-spirited measure.
“It appears to be piling on the anti-immigrant sentiment that exists in some communities out there,” Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski told the Anchorage Daily News.
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.
