Alaska lawmakers again unsuccessful in last-minute efforts to pass election reform

Yahoo

21-05-2025

May 20—JUNEAU — An attempt to update Alaska's election laws has again failed in the final day of the legislative session, with lawmakers promising to return to the effort when they reconvene in January.
Since 2022, lawmakers have sought several changes to Alaska's voting laws. Republicans want to more easily remove inactive voters from the state's rolls. Democrats want to make absentee voting easier and ensure that the state's rural, predominantly Alaska Native voters have equal access to the polls. Mirroring previous efforts, lawmakers this year again tried to craft a bill including both parties' priorities.
And again, they fell short.
The House and Senate majorities began the session with a shared commitment to updating the state's voting statutes, after previously failing to do so in the final hours of the 2024 and 2022 legislative sessions.
But Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat who crafted the election bill in the Senate, said that the plan fell apart in the final days of the session because minority Republicans declined to support reforms sought by the majority coalitions.
"I think a few people really started to take a partisan perspective on it and blew the bill up," said Wielechowski.
Wielechowski said he had sought GOP support for the election bill in order to persuade Gov. Mike Dunleavy not to veto it. Dunleavy has not commented on whether he was opposed to the legislation, but Wielechowski said he was confident that the governor would veto the measure if it did not have minority GOP support.
Senate Bill 64 passed the Senate earlier this month but stalled in the House Finance Committee as Republican committee members claimed the bill would open the door to potential election fraud.
The package includes measures to allow Alaskans to correct mistakes on absentee ballots, a process known as "ballot curing"; it removes the requirement for witness signatures on absentee ballots; it speeds up the ballot counting process; it streamlines the process of removing ineligible voters from the rolls; it requires the Division of Elections to be staffed with rural liaisons; it guarantees prepaid ballot postage for absentee ballots; and it allows voters to opt in to receive absentee ballots every election year, rather than having to request an absentee ballot ahead of every election, among other changes and updates.
House Minority Leader Mia Costello said that her caucus's move to block election legislation from passing this year was a "major accomplishment" for the House minority.
"It just simply was not something that we thought should see the light of day," said Costello.
Late last year, former House Speaker Cathy Tilton said during a talk radio interview that Republican members of what was then the House majority blocked an election bill — which contained many of the provisions contained in this year's measure — because it would have increased the likelihood of Alaska's Democratic U.S. representative holding on to her seat in the 2024 election by making it easier for people in rural Alaska to vote.
After the failure of last year's election bill, Alaska Native voters again encountered barriers to voting. The Alaska Division of Elections didn't deliver election materials on time to rural parts of the state, then fired the elections chief for the regional office overseeing most remote communities in the state shortly before the November election, and also didn't open some rural precincts on time due to staffing challenges.
The Alaska Federation of Natives and other Alaska Native groups supported many of the election reforms included in this year's bill, urging lawmakers to pass it in time for it to be implemented ahead of the 2026 election.
"After it blew up in the House Finance Committee, we redoubled our efforts and got together with some of the harshest critics of the bill," said Wielechowski. "We had extremely productive conversations and actually came to a point where we had consensus."
Those critics included Senate Minority Leader Mike Shower, a Wasilla Republican, and Rep. Sarah Vance, a Homer Republican. The three reached agreement on a pared-down bill, but Wielechowski said that opposition among House Republicans remained.
"When you sort of dig yourself in on a position and demonize something, it makes it difficult to un-demonize it," said Wielechowski. "I think that's what happened with this bill. There was a lot of misinformation."
Shower said the original election bill "had too many things that I would consider access over security."
"We worked really hard over the weekend to strip all those out," said Shower. "It became a very neutral bill."
He said the "neutral" provisions that remained in the bill included ballot curing and measures to make it easier to remove inactive voters from the state's list. But Shower said that there wasn't enough time to convince Republicans to vote for the measure.
"To do this over the weekend right before the end of session, was just a bridge too far," said Shower. "We had so many bad things to say the week before — we did a really good job of killing it — and then it was hard to pull it back."
Vance said she hoped the stripped-down bill could be considered next legislative session.
"We did come to almost 100% agreement, but we just simply ran out of time to be able to have the fuller discussion with our caucuses, so we have tabled that until January," said Vance.
Wielechowski said he thought the majorities in the House and Senate could have passed a bill Tuesday without the Republican minority's support. But that would have made the bill vulnerable to Dunleavy's veto pen.
"I don't want to pass something that is going to get vetoed — that I know will get vetoed — without doing everything I can to try to a point where we enact good policy," said Wielechowski.
Senate President Gary Stevens and House Speaker Bryce Edgmon said the plan was to pass the bill next session.
"Next year, hopefully we can deal with this early in January or February, and have a little more leisure time to really get through all the details, and if we do it early enough, it'll have an impact on the coming election," said Stevens.
Another measure to reimpose campaign contribution limits known as House Bill 16 was also halted in its tracks in the final hours of the session. Like Senate Bill 64, Wielechowski said he thought the campaign contribution measure would not withstand Dunleavy's veto without minority support, so he declined to bring it to a Senate floor vote.
Alaska has been without campaign contribution limits since 2021, when a federal judge invalidated the state's previous ones. After that ruling, Dunleavy said he's inclined to support unlimited donations, as long as they're publicly disclosed. Dunleavy then benefited from six-figure contributions during his 2022 reelection campaign.
Shower said that he was concerned about reimposing campaign contribution limits because he thought the move could be disadvantageous to Republicans.
"I support us finding contribution limits, because I would like to see big money out, but it has to be in a way that's going to balance the playing field for all candidates," said Shower. The bill as it's written, Shower said, "is going to hurt one side and not the other."
House Bill 16 mimics the language of a ballot initiative that is set to go before voters in 2026 unless lawmakers adopt it next session.
Daily News reporter Sean Maguire contributed to this story.