Alaska election bill stalls in House committee with days remaining in legislative session

Yahoo

18-05-2025

May 17—JUNEAU — A bill meant to update Alaska's election laws has stalled in a House committee, casting doubt on whether the measure can pass before the end of the session, House leaders said Saturday.
Senate Bill 64 is a compilation of voting-related measures that passed the Senate along caucus lines on Monday, giving the House just 10 days' time to parse the 33-page bill before the end-of-session deadline. The legislative session must end on Wednesday.
The package includes measures to allow Alaskans to correct mistakes on absentee ballots, a process used in two-thirds of states; it removes the requirement for witness signatures on absentee ballots; it speeds up the ballot counting process; and it streamlines the process of removing ineligible voters from the rolls, among other changes.
It would ensure that the Division of Elections is staffed with rural liaisons, in an effort to address repeat instances in which polling places in rural Alaska do not open due to missing election materials or understaffing. The measure would also require the state to offer prepaid ballot postage for absentee ballots, and allow voters to opt-in to receive absentee ballots every election year, rather than having to request an absentee ballot ahead of every election.
If the bill does not pass this year, lawmakers could take it up again when they reconvene in January, but that may make it difficult for the Division of Elections to implement the changes ahead of the 2026 election.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski, an Anchorage Democrat who took the lead on crafting the bill, said this was the top issue he worked on this session.
"This has been my No. 1 focus," Wielechowski said Saturday. "I've had dozens of meetings on it with everybody — all caucuses, the governor's office."
But ultimately, none of the Senate Republican minority members voted in favor of the bill, and in the House Finance Committee, the bill faced question after question about the bill's implications for election security. The bill includes provisions introduced by Gov. Mike Dunleavy earlier this year, but the governor has remained silent on it.
The House Finance Committee spent several hours debating the bill on Wednesday and Thursday, before Foster said Friday that he would not take up the bill again in committee before the end of the session.
"I'm going to be setting that aside," Foster said during a Friday committee hearing. "We gave it a shot, thinking that we might be able to arrive at some consensus, but we just simply can't do it in the short amount of time that we have, to give it the proper due diligence that we need to get through introduction all the way through passage."
Foster later said that minority members had indicated they would introduce up to 100 amendments to the bill, which would take up more than a day's worth of committee work.
Rep. Jeremy Bynum, a Ketchikan Republican who serves on the Finance Committee, said his questions were not intended to stall the bill, but rather to ensure it received sufficient consideration.
The measure is supported by several Alaska groups, including the Alaska Federation of Natives, which sent out a message on Friday urging its members to call lawmakers and push for the bill's passage. Alaska Native voting advocates have long said that the state's voting system does not provide adequate support for voters in the state's rural communities, and many of the fixes they have requested are included in the bill.
The reform efforts are motivated in part by a special election conducted in 2022 by mail, in which thousands of absentee ballots were rejected due to deficient witness signatures, impacting rural communities disproportionately. The 2024 election also saw hundreds of absentee ballots rejected, many for lacking a witness signature.
This would not be the first time that an omnibus election bill fell apart in the final days of a legislative session. In 2022, a last-minute deal to restore Alaska's campaign finance laws fell through in the last day of the session, tanking with it other pieces of election-related legislation. The following year, a bill to update Alaska's election laws was again introduced but failed to pass both the House and Senate before the 2024 session concluded.
A separate piece of election-related legislation is still poised for consideration in the Senate before the session concludes. House Bill 16, which has already passed the House, would impose campaign contribution limits for state-run elections for the first time since a federal judge in 2021 invalidated the state's previous limits.
Wielechowski said some pieces of the election bill could still pass this year, as he works on paring down the measure and selecting the pieces of it that can garner broad support.
"This is not going away. It's been a decade in the making," he said.