Election deniers in Alaska have blamed everything from Alaska’s automatic voter registration system to baseless conspiracies about undocumented immigrants voting for their electoral losses, but actual fraud or manipulation of Alaska’s election system is next to non-existent.
While Alaska’s Republican-run Division of Elections has faced its share of criticism over how it’s handled elections—whether it be polling places opening late or not at all, the attempt to block a Petersburg man named Dan Sullivan from running against US Sen. Dan Sullivan, or its decision to hand over confidential voter information to the federal government—it has never faced any credible accusations that there’s any reason to distrust the final vote count.
That comes down to several safeguards the Division of Elections has established over the years that guide the agency through each year’s elections, covering everything from testing and calibrating voting machines to maintaining a paper record, regular audits, and hand recounts in close races.
Bipartisan precinct election boards review and certify voting machines, and the counting process is open to the public and media. Parties and ballot measure groups can also appoint poll watchers.
When counting ballots, local precincts also use a system to ensure the number of cast ballots matches the number of people who signed in to vote, to ensure no one’s stuffing the ballot. And while there’s been no evidence of ballot stuffing in Alaska, conservative anxiety about it is one of the main reasons why bipartisan election bills don’t include drop boxes.
The state has also established a strong chain of custody for ballots, ensuring it knows where they are from initial design and printing through election night and beyond.
That allows officials to conduct recounts or audits after the fact, as the Division of Elections did in 2020 to double-check the results of the measure that enacted open primaries and ranked-choice voting. That audit found the state’s electronic counting machines were more than 99% accurate, noting that out of more than 641,000 ballots cast, only 24 differed.
“This audit showed what the division knew it would; that our equipment worked properly, and the 2020 general election was administered accurately and fairly in the state of Alaska,” said then-Elections Director Gail Fenumiai in a prepared statement at the time.
As for non-citizen voting, there’s no evidence that it’s a prevalent problem.
But that’s not for a lack of trying by the state’s Republican-led Department of Law, which has been doggedly pursuing voter misconduct charges against several American Samoan residents of Whittier. In that case, the defendants argue that, as US nationals, they knew they weren’t allowed to vote in federal elections, but were misled by a local official into believing they could still participate in local elections.
The defendants’ attorneys argue that they never intended to break the law and see the state’s prosecution as a political attempt to deliver on Republican claims that non-citizen voting is a real problem.
While those cases continue to play out in a protracted court battle, the state has continued to look for noncitizen voters and is largely coming up empty-handed.
This summer, the Division of Elections announced that it had removed more than 3,000 suspected noncitizens from the voter rolls—only to later concede that they had used outdated data from the drivers’ license applications. As of early August, more than 600 of those affected voters have already responded and updated their registration, with the main issue seeming to be that they became naturalized citizens after getting their license and had no reason to update their status with the DMV.
That includes Anchorage resident Janine Hearne, a graphic designer who moved to the United States in 2019 and became naturalized in 2024. In an interview with The Alaska Current, she said it was a shock and that she got her voter registration status fixed, but the state of the Division of Elections, which is overseen by the state’s lieutenant governor, will be on her mind heading into this fall’s elections.
“Getting that letter was kind of like a little bit of a kick in the teeth. I’ve done everything the right way in this country to come in, to naturalize. I’m a military wife; I’ve done everything the right way to get here,” she said. “The way that voting and voter access have been attacked nationally, I would want to think that Alaska is better than that.”
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.
