Alaska lawmakers on Monday failed to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a bill offering a number of ballot access and election security reforms. Two Southeast Alaska lawmakers who had previously supported the bill voted against the override, leading it to fail 38 to 22. Lawmakers needed 40 votes to override the veto.
Proponents of Senate Bill 64, an unlikely coalition that included some of the Legislature’s most conservative Republican lawmakers and every member of the bipartisan House and Senate majorities, with one exception, said the bill would make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
“Right now, our system is broken,” said Rep. Sarah Vance, a member of the all-Republican minority who backed the bill in the House.
The bill would have implemented a ballot tracking and curing system, allowing Alaskans to see that their votes had been counted and allowing them to fix minor errors on absentee ballots. Alaska discards hundreds of votes each election for minor errors, like a missing witness signature. The bill would not have allowed voters to change their actual votes.
The bill would have also sped the Division of Elections’ ability to remove ineligible voters from the active rolls if a registered voter did certain things that indicate they live somewhere else, like applying for public benefits or claiming a residential property tax exemption. It also would have allowed the Division of Elections to start processing ballots sooner, leading to quicker results.
Both lawmakers who flipped — Rep. Jeremy Bynum, a Ketchikan Republican, and Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican — said they shared the governor’s stated concern that the bill’s ballot tracking and curing provisions could not be effectively implemented ahead of the November election.
“We were being asked to tell the administration to apply this into law, and the communications from the administration were that they were not able to do that effectively and timely,” Bynum said.
Bynum said he consulted Dunleavy, the lieutenant governor, local tribes and a range of other legislators, including Stedman, in arriving at his decision to vote down the bill. He said he had “not made a deal or an exchange” for his vote against overriding the governor.
Stedman echoed Bynum’s concerns.
“I think there's a lot of good work in this bill and a lot of positive things, but it just needs a little more time,” Stedman said. He said the governor’s office had not urged him to vote one way or another.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, who pushed the bill forward alongside Vance, questioned whether it truly was infeasible to set up a ballot tracking and curing system with more than six months to go before the November election.
“Congressman Don Young passed away on March 18, 2022. On April 28, just five, six weeks later, the governor's Division of Elections announced that ballot tracking would be available by the company BallotTrax for the June 11, 2022, election,” Wielechowski said. “Six weeks. They got a ballot tracking system set up in six weeks, just four years ago.”
One caveat: it’s the lieutenant governor, rather than the governor, who heads the Division of Elections. And four years later, there’s a different lieutenant governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, and a different director of the Division of Elections, Carol Beecher.
That new Division of Elections director, though, said in March that implementing a tracking system would be “challenging” and would likely need to be done manually — but not, notably, that it couldn’t be done.
Wielechowski said he wished the administration was up for the challenge.
“I'm not prepared to tell Alaskans, ‘Sorry, you'll have to wait another year. It's just too hard,’” he said.
In addition to the provisions tightening Alaska’s voter rolls and setting up a ballot tracking and curing system, the bill included a number of other reforms.
The bill included prepaid postage on absentee ballots, an elections liaison for rural communities, and better pay for election workers in villages where it’s often difficult to find people to staff the polls. The bill also required that voters be notified of a data breach and sought a quicker timeline for absentee ballot processing in hopes of quicker results.
It also specified that tribal IDs were valid identification at the polls, an item Bynum cited as important to his support of the bill. The Division of Elections posted to social media while the bill was pending asserting that tribal IDs are acceptable forms of voter identification and had been for decades.
The mix of election security and ballot access reforms included in the bill attracted support from some of the Legislature’s most conservative and most liberal members.
Vance said she’d received “rumors, threats and … bullying” from conservative commentators, including writer Suzanne Downing, because of her support of the bill.
“There has been slander and an all-out assault to discredit and, frankly, lie to the people about what this bill does,” she said.
Even so, a number of conservative Republicans voted to override the governor. Rep. Kevin McCabe, a Big Lake Republican, offered an apology “to Alaskans who will bear the cost of this veto.”
Strikingly, neither advocates nor opponents in the Legislature on Monday claimed the bill would help one party more than another.
“If I lose an election because a little old lady in Arctic Village had to cure her ballot, and that one ballot cost me my election, so be it,” said Senate Minority Leader Mike Cronk, a Tok Republican. “Aren't we here to make sure every vote counts?”
This story has been updated.
