As the Trump administration launched a pre-emptive attack on election results in Alaska’s critical U.S. Senate race, some polling places in rural villages key to Democratic hopes have been slow to open, tribal leaders and voting-rights activists say.
What they don’t know is if the closed polling places are a result of a purposeful attempt to block thousands from voting or because voting has always been tricky to manage in the far-flung, rural villages of Alaska’s wilderness.
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state of Alaska at the president’s request seeking to block certification of the Senate election in Alaska if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses.
Their argument, which many legal observers have dismissed as unlikely to succeed, was that voters intending to cast ballots for the incumbent, Dan Sullivan, could mistakenly choose another candidate with the same name. They asked the federal court to preemptively agree to intervene should that happen. National Democrats and the League of Women Voters, among others, have asked to join the defense.
Now Democrats and people who organize rural Alaskans to vote are sounding a warning about polling places.
In a letter sent Friday to the state elections division and Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom, a Republican who oversees the office, a state lawmaker warned that at least 18 voting locations in rural Alaska listed on the election division’s website have not actually opened.
“There is no legal excuse for the failure to open these sites,” wrote Senator Bill Wielechowski, a Democrat who represents east Anchorage, adding: “To say the Division’s failures are shocking would be a profound understatement.”
Alaskans vote in person, though anyone in the state can vote early at a polling place or request an in-person absentee ballot. That’s how most rural villages vote.
This is far from the first time Alaska has struggled to get ballots to voters in its remote villages, many accessible only by plane or boat.
In 2024, mail delays prevented some rural polling places from opening for early voting on schedule. And in 2022, ballots from several villages arrived too late to be fully counted.
In his letter, Mr. Wielechowski also highlighted problems with Alaska’s primary election in August, citing “dozens of rural Alaska voters whose votes were not counted because it took too long for their ballots to reach election counting sites by mail.”
He said that for the November election, in at least 18 places, “local partners who were supposed to operate voting sites reported that they did not receive the necessary materials or even know the were expected to operate a voting site.”
“I think some of these systems that we’re being told are broken systems are actually working the way that these people have designed them to work,” said Mike Jones, tribal president for the Haida Organized Village of Kasaan. “They’re designed to be confusing and hold people up and frustrate people to the point where they don’t want to bother with it.”
Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, didn’t spot any menace. “This is just the usual logistical failure.” she said.
Ms. Sparck said missing polling places represented “a systemic issue that we have every single election cycle” and blamed a gap in understanding — and interest — among state leaders about just how hard it can be to reach a more established polling location.
This year, voting access in Alaska is a national issue, because the state is a surprising battleground in two important races.
Former Democratic state legislator Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins has led polls since the August primary in the four-person race for governor, and is seeking to become the first Democrat to lead the state since 1998.
The U.S. Senate race looms even larger in national conversations.
Senator Dan Sullivan finished second in the primary to Representative Mary Peltola and has trailed her in polls since then. The Alaska Senate race is considered critical to Democratic hopes of taking back the chamber. Republicans worry the presence of another Dan Sullivan, a retired teacher, will confuse voters enough to hurt the incumbent under Alaska’s ranked-choice system.
Republicans outnumber Democrats in Alaska, 23 percent to 11 percent, though independents make up the bulk of the state electorate, and they’re largely clustered in the more urbanized Railbelt region around Anchorage.
Thus, Ms. Peltola and Mr. Kreiss-Tomkins have focused much of their campaign efforts on reaching the small but important pockets of potential Democratic voters in rural, usually Native-dominated villages.
The state elections division could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Ms. Sparck said she did not see a way for state leaders to solve the missing polling place problem in time for people in the affected areas to vote.
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