Alaska elections officials hope to avoid problems with rural voting, as seen in primary

For some rural and predominantly Native Alaska communities, there hasn’t always been a guarantee that polling places will be open on Election Day.

As the Associated Press noted in a recent story, multiple rural precincts had problems getting polling places open for the primary election in August, and in a couple villages, the voting locations didn’t open at all.

The Division of Elections, along with regional and local officials, say they’re “highly invested” in getting polling places open for Tuesday’s election. But a major challenge in the past has been finding temporary elections workers in Alaska’s far-flung villages.

This fall, Associated Press reporter Mark Thiessen traveled to Kaktovik, one of two Alaska communities whose polling places didn’t open for the primary. And, as Thiessen told Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove, it came down to staffing.

Listen:

[Sign up for Alaska Public Media’s daily newsletter to get our top stories delivered to your inbox.]

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mark Thiessen: We had a mixed bag. There were some people who were out of town. For a lot of Alaska Native villages, the late August primary presents some problems for small villages, because people are subsistence hunting or fishing, they’re traveling or on vacation, and just, you know, getting ready for the school year.

Casey Grove: It sounds like a major issue was just staffing, that there’s this training that’s required, a lot of those places, you have to fly somewhere else to do the training. It’s a temporary job, and it pays something like 20 bucks an hour. But you pointed out in your story that that 20 bucks an hour doesn’t go as far in some of these places, right?

MT: Exactly. You know, it’s never the same village that this happens. It varies from election to election. But a lot of people at Kaktovik told me that the low pay is, you know, the big problem. We walked around the grocery store just amazed by the prices. A can of corn is $4.50. I had heard that pumpkins were going for about $80 for a small one.

CG: So you would have to work your temporary polling worker job for four hours to be able to afford a pumpkin.

MT: Exactly, exactly. And you got to work for, I think they say you have to be there for 16 hours, or you have to work a split shift. And, you know, if you can’t get one person, you’re not going to get two people there to do a split shift. So that’s kind of tough.

CG: Yeah, no kidding. I mean, like you said, this has happened over the years. It’s in different places, and the fact that the polls just didn’t open up does seem to be a problem. But what if this had happened somewhere else, in the Lower 48, especially in a swing state. I mean, what do you think the reaction would be there?

MT: I was talking to George Kaleak, who is a whaling captain there, and he’s the one who brought this point up pretty succinctly. He said, “If this happened in Seattle, there’d be holy hell to pay,” you know, if a poll doesn’t open. But here, it just doesn’t matter. We also talked to Michelle Sparck with Get Out the Native Vote, and she said that in Alaska, we seem just to overlook this, that it’s a quirk of rural Alaska where, “Oh, a poll didn’t open, OK. Well, maybe next time, better luck next time.” You know, her organization says that’s out of bounds, that’s outrageous, and it shouldn’t be happening.

CG: And there’s kind of another interesting thing going on here, too, where in the congressional race for Alaska’s only seat in the U.S. House, of course, we have the first Alaska Native congressional member, Mary Peltola, running to keep her seat against Nick Begich III, the Republican challenger, and it makes sense that she would be very popular in some of these rural areas where, you know, there are many Alaska Native people. At the same time, control of the U.S. House is in question in this election. And what are people saying about that? I mean, it’s sort of not just out of sight, out of mind with with this one, right?

MT: You know, Mary Peltola, while not always a definitive Democratic vote, certainly would, you know, bolster the Democrats’ chances of taking the House back. Mary Peltola spoke to (the Alaska Federation of Natives convention) earlier this month and said, basically, this race is going to be decided by a few dozen votes, and if you have one polling place that doesn’t open, whether it’s 200 votes or if it’s 400 votes, that could sway the election right there.

CG: I mean, you mentioned some of the response from the state Division of Elections. … What did they say about taking care of this problem in, you know, Kaktovik or anywhere else that you looked at?

MT: Right, well, the state — Carol Beecher is head of the Division of Elections, and she said that they’re highly invested in trying to make sure all the polls open. But, you know, there are things that are sometimes outside their control, with people not showing up, but they’re trying to do the best they can. But we also have some outside groups that are trying to do everything they can to make sure polls open. Get Out the Native Vote has, I believe, 11 people set up to step in and go to villages throughout the state in case the state can’t open the poll for whatever reason, because somebody doesn’t show up, or whatever. Also, the North Slope Borough is very invested in trying to get polling places open in their borough. They will send people, they will offer to send people to Kaktovik, Anaktuvuk Pass or other places if need be, if the state can’t open the polls.