Alaska lawmakers on Monday failed to override Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s veto of a bill offering a number of ballot access and election security reforms. Two Southeast Alaska lawmakers who had previously supported the bill voted against the override, leading it to fail 38 to 22. Lawmakers needed 40 votes to override the veto.
Proponents of Senate Bill 64, an unlikely coalition that included some of the Legislature’s most conservative Republican lawmakers and every member of the bipartisan House and Senate majorities, said Senate Bill 64 would make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.
The bill would have implemented a ballot tracking and curing system, allowing Alaskans to see that their votes had been counted and allowing them to fix minor errors on absentee ballots. Alaska discards hundreds of votes each election for minor errors, like a missing witness signature. The bill would not have allowed voters to change their actual votes.
The bill would have also sped the Division of Elections’ ability to remove ineligible voters from the active rolls if a registered voter did certain things that indicate they live somewhere else, like applying for public benefits or claiming a residential property tax exemption. It also would have allowed the Division of Elections to start processing ballots sooner, leading to quicker results
Both lawmakers who flipped — Rep. Jeremy Bynum, a Ketchikan Republican, and Sen. Bert Stedman, a Sitka Republican — said they shared the governor’s stated concern that the bill’s ballot tracking and curing provisions could not be effectively implemented ahead of the November election.
“From the time that the bill was passed to the time that the governor actually got it, there was delay, and then when the governor got it, there was delay,” Bynum said in an interview following the vote. “My expectation was, from all those involved, that they would work with the administration to ensure that those situations were resolved, and apparently they were not.”
Bynum said he consulted with Dunleavy, the lieutenant governor, local tribes and a range of other legislators, including Stedman, in arriving at his decision to vote down the bill. He said he had “not made a deal or an exchange” for his vote against overriding the governor.
Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski, one of the bill’s primary advocates, questioned whether it truly was infeasible to set up a ballot tracking and curing system with more than six months to go before the November election.
“Congressman Don Young passed away on March 18, 2022. On April 28, just five, six weeks later, the governor's Division of Elections announced that ballot tracking would be available by the company BallotTrax for the June 11, 2022, election,” Wielechowski said. “Six weeks. They got a ballot tracking system set up in six weeks, just four years ago.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
