As a Justice Department lawsuit challenging the presence of two U.S. Senate candidates named Dan Sullivan on the Alaska ballot plays out, Democrats have filed a lawsuit in Alaska accusing election officials of failing to properly operate at least 18 rural polling locations.
The complaint, filed Friday afternoon in Anchorage Superior Court, warns that several thousand voters across remote, predominantly Alaska Native communities face disenfranchisement in a state where elections are routinely decided by a few thousand or even a few hundred votes.
Given Alaska’s vast geography and the logistical hurdles voters in remote areas encounter, state law allows any qualified voter to request an absentee ballot and establishes an in-person absentee and early voting window beginning 15 days before Election Day.
In remote communities, the state relies on agreements with local municipal and tribal offices to host and staff sites where residents can cast absentee ballots in person.
The Democrats’ lawsuit alleges that state-advertised absentee-in-person voting sites across 18 rural communities either failed to open, opened late, maintained irregular hours or lacked ballots altogether. In some communities, local workers reportedly resigned without replacements, while others had not received ballots or were unaware they were supposed to host voting.
According to the complaint, some voters traveled to their designated voting location “by boat or by plane” only to be turned away.
State Senator Bill Wielechowski wrote the elections division earlier this month, noting the 18 precincts that hadn’t opened and asking for help.
In her response this week, the Alaska elections director, Carol Beecher, said 12 of the 18 sites had confirmed they were open, three had declined to open, and state officials were still trying to contact the remaining three. She emphasized the role local partners are supposed to play in rural voting, suggesting blame for the confusion about where and when to vote rested largely in the villages rather than the state elections office.
Some 82 percent of Alaska communities are not accessible by road, and the state elections office routinely struggles to ensure residents in farther-flung places can vote, with ballots sometimes arriving too late to be counted or polling sites never opening.
This time around, Democrats want the state elections office to make sure all remote polling sites are open and stay open until polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. They also want the state to pay their attorney fees.
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