Early voting starts for Alaska’s Aug. 20 primary election

Early voting started Monday for Alaska’s Aug. 20 primary election.

Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be on the primary ballot, alongside all 40 seats in the Alaska House of Representatives. Half of the state Senate’s 20 seats will also be on the ballot.

In 2020, Alaska voters narrowly approved a ballot initiative that implemented ranked choice voting and open primaries. Alaskans first used the new voting system in the 2022 election cycle. This year, voters will again pick one candidate per race in the primary election.

The top four vote-getters, regardless of political affiliation, will advance to the Nov. 5 general election.

Lauri Wilson, the Region 1 elections supervisor, reiterated in a Monday interview that voters need to remember the primary is not a ranked choice election, unlike the November general election.

“It’s a pick-one primary. Vote for one (candidate) and move to the next race,” she said.

The U.S. House race

Twelve candidates are vying to represent Alaska in the U.S. House. Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola’s two main challengers are Republicans: Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and businessman Nick Begich III, who is making his second run for Congress. The primary determines which four candidates advance to the general election.

Peltola has a sizable fundraising advantage against Dahlstrom and Begich, according to July filings with the Federal Election Commission, but Alaska’s lone U.S. House seat is one of a small handful nationwide that is seen as winnable by both Democrats and Republicans. The nine other congressional candidates did not report raising enough money to file a report. Four of them live out of state.

While Peltola, Dahlstrom and Begich are set to garner most of the attention, funding and votes ahead of the November election, the fourth-place finisher in the race could have a role in shaping the campaign moving forward.

One independent pro-Peltola group has already begun spending money attacking one of the other candidates, Gerald Heikes, a Republican. Jim Lottsfledt, a political consultant working for the group called Vote Alaska Before Party, said the group wanted to highlight the record of all candidates who oppose abortion access, including Dahlstrom, Begich and Heikes.

In some cases, candidates have said that if they underperform in the primary, they will withdraw from their respective races. That includes Begich, the Republican running for U.S. House, who has said he will withdraw if he comes in behind Dahlstrom, in an effort to rally around a single Republican candidate. Even if one of them drops out, the November ballot could still include more than one GOP candidate for Alaska’s U.S. House seat.

Heikes said he was also asked by leaders of the Alaska Republican Party to drop out of the race after the primary election, in order to bolster the chances of the leading GOP candidate. Heikes said that after he learned that Dahlstrom supported abortion access in cases of rape and incest, he decided he would stay in the race no matter the primary result.

“I decided I’m just going to stick this one out and see what happens,” said Heikes.

Candidates have until Sept. 9 to drop out of the race after the primary to ensure their name does not appear on the November ballot.

Which candidates will advance to the November election?

Most races for the Alaska House and Senate have four or fewer candidates, meaning candidates in those races will automatically advance from the primary to the general election.

Two state races have five or more candidates. Eagle River’s Senate seat has five candidates, including incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Merrick. She is being challenged by former GOP Reps. Sharon Jackson and Ken McCarty. Jared Goecker, a Republican, and Lee Hammermeister, a Democrat, are also running to replace Merrick.

Fairbanks Republican Sen. Click Bishop announced in May that he was not running for reelection. Four candidates are running for Bishop’s Senate seat, which is one of the largest districts in the state, stretching from Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in the south to Gates of the Arctic National Park in the north.

Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk is one of the four running to replace Bishop. Six candidates have filed to run for Cronk’s seat. They include Glennallen Libertarian James Fields; Delta Junction Republican Palema Goode; Fairbanks Democrat Brandon Kowalski; Fort Greely Republican Dana Mock; Glennallen Republican Rebeca Schwanke; and Fairbanks Republican Cole Snodgrass.

Nine incumbent state legislators are running unopposed. In addition to Bishop not seeking reelection, Reps. Jennie Armstrong, D-Anchorage, Laddie Shaw, R-Anchorage, and Dan Ortiz, I-Ketchikan, announced they were leaving office at the end of their terms.

Candidates and political observers noted that the primary election results can be a helpful metric for candidates seeking to gauge their popularity with voters ahead of the general election. But the number of voters who cast ballots in the primary is typically much smaller than in the general election, and those who choose to vote are typically more politically engaged.

“It will be a kind of a marker, but I know the end game is the general election in November,” Fairbanks Republican candidate Leslie Hajdukovich said in a recent interview. Hajdukovich is running against Democratic incumbent Sen. Scott Kawasaki in what is set to be one of the most expensive legislative races of the year.

How to vote

Voters can cast a ballot in person leading up to the Aug. 20 primary election. The Alaska Division of Elections has a list of voting locations and opening hours posted on its website. The division also has an online interactive map where voters can find their closest polling place based on their zip code.

In Anchorage, early voting is available in the City Hall building and in the Division of Elections office on Gambell Street.

In Juneau, two early voting locations opened Monday. Both were quiet on the first morning of in-person voting.

Election workers in Juneau said there was some confusion about the primary election ballot. There are two ballot initiatives set to appear on the general election ballot: One to repeal ranked choice voting and another to boost the state minimum wage. However, neither ballot initiative will appear on the primary election ballot.

Alaska voters can request an absentee ballot for any reason. Voters must request an absentee ballot by mail for the primary election by Aug. 10. Absentee ballots can also be requested online and printed at home by Aug. 19.Absentee ballots must be postmarked on or before Aug. 20 to be counted.

In 2022, close to 7,500 absentee ballots were rejected in Alaska’s first all-mail election, with a greater proportion of those rejected ballots coming from parts of the state where Alaska Natives make up a majority of the population. Two-thirds of those ballots were rejected for mistakes made on envelopes containing the ballots.

To have by-mail ballots counted, voters need to have identification information on their ballot envelope, a witness watch them sign the envelope, and then have the witness sign it themselves.

Three civil rights law firms sued the Division of Elections, arguing that voters had been disenfranchised because the state does not have a method to fix errors on absentee ballots. That court case is ongoing.

The Legislature debated an election bill this year that would have allowed voters to fix mistakes in their absentee ballot after it had been sent. But that measure failed to pass in the final hours of the legislative session.