Anchorage officials say a New York Times story inaccurately described a new system that allows residents to cast their ballots electronically.
On Thursday, the New York Times published a story titled “Will People Trust Voting by Phone? Alaska Is Going to Find Out,” which spotlighted a method city officials are using to allow voters to submit ballots electronically.
Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz said she was surprised when she read the piece.
“I thought that it was going to be a bigger story about many, many jurisdictions and many different anecdotes,” Heinz said in an interview Friday. “And when it was solely about us and we were moving to mobile voting, I was, I was shocked.”
After the story was published, city officials sent out a public statement saying the piece misrepresented the voting system.
“Readers of the New York Times have been led to believe the MOA Elections team has embarked on some novel, unsecure agenda on the bleeding edge of integrity in local elections,” Heinz wrote in the statement. “Rest assured, municipal voters: the article is an egregious misrepresentation of MOA Elections."
Anchorage election administrator Liz Edwards said the story was wrong in describing the method as a “first of its scale” experiment the city was about to conduct.
“We started it back this past April, so we've already rolled it out,” Edwards said. “It's not an experiment. It worked. We had great feedback from voters, and so it's something that we're going to continue moving forward.”
In fact, Heinz said over 2,500 jurisdictions across 36 other states use the software.
Of the more than 60,000 ballots cast in April, Edwards said 136 voters cast their ballots remotely using the system, which is called the secure document portal. Voters must voluntarily apply to use the system, and Edwards said it is very secure and works similarly to the city’s vote-by-email method, which has been around for years.
“We verify their identifier signature,” Edwards said. “We give them a special pin. They again have to provide identifiers and sign, and the system itself, you have to have special permissions to even access on the backend. So it's all secured at every single level of the journey of their ballot.”
Heinz said the Anchorage Assembly approved the voting method in December 2024. She said the time it took to implement the system ahead of last April’s election prevented officials from being able to do an outreach campaign to teach residents about the software. She said they had planned to do that ahead of next April’s election, before the Times piece was published.
“We did have plans to do outreach and education on this, and this is an unfortunate situation, but we've definitely got the ears of all of the local reporters now,” Heinz said, laughing.
Ultimately, Edwards said the goal is to make it easier for residents to vote.
“We have a lot of people who are snowbirds, or we have a large military population,” Edwards said. “So we're trying to make it as easy as we can, so that people are engaged in the process, that they have their voices heard, that they can participate in their community.”
Edwards said the city plans to allow voters to use the secure document portal for next April’s city election, but it won’t be used for statewide and federal elections. Residents will still be able to vote in other ways, like by-mail, by-fax or the good old fashioned in-person way.
