Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed a bipartisan election reform bill Thursday, setting up a contentious override vote in the coming days.
Senate Bill 64 proposed a variety of changes to Alaska’s election system, especially around absentee voting. The bill would set up a ballot tracking and curing system, which would allow Alaskans to watch their votes move through the counting process and correct minor errors on absentee ballots. Hundreds of ballots with curable issues, especially on military bases and in rural Alaska, were not counted in the 2024 election.
The bill would also offer postage-paid return envelopes for absentee ballots and speed ballot-counting and the reporting of results.
It also includes a number of provisions aimed at beefing up election security, including by shortening the timeline for removing someone from the active voter rolls. Currently, it takes as many as eight years, even if there’s clear evidence the voter no longer lives in Alaska, one reason that Alaska’s voter rolls exceed its population. Inactive voters remain on the rolls due to federal law but can still cast provisional ballots.
In a letter to legislators, Dunleavy said he supported many of the reforms and even encouraged lawmakers to model future election bills on the one he vetoed. But Dunleavy said the ballot tracking and curing system couldn’t be “responsibly built, tested, and deployed” before the November general election.
The Division of Elections’ director, Carol Beecher, told lawmakers in March that implementing a ballot tracking and curing system before the general election would be “challenging.”
The division likely could not create an electronic tracking and curing system before the November general election, but “the division could do something manually during the ‘26 elections,” Beecher said at a hearing March 12.
Dunleavy also said the provisions allowing ballot curing “create tension with Alaska’s witness requirement by allowing a voter to cure a missing witness signature after the ballot has already been returned, even though Alaska’s absentee-ballot framework requires the voter's certificate to be signed in the presence of a qualified attesting official or witness.”
In a separate letter to the heads of the House and Senate, Dunleavy proposed alternative language creating a ballot curing system taken from a prior Senate bill.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat who worked on the bill, said the veto was disappointing news. He worked alongside Homer Republican Rep. Sarah Vance, a member of the minority, to craft the bill.
“It's a broken system, and he had an opportunity to fix it,” Wielechowski said. “It's a bipartisan measure. We've worked with extreme — you know, very conservative members, worked with his office.”
A joint session to override the veto could be convened within a few days, Wielechowski said earlier this week.
It’s unclear whether the bill has enough support, though. It requires 40 votes, and the bill passed by a combined vote of 39 to 20 with one member absent.
