Early voting will open Aug. 1 for the Aug. 16 special election to fill the unexpired term of the late U.S. Rep. Don Young and the primary election, also Aug. 16, for governor, Legislature, U.S. Senate, and to select the top candidates for a full two-year term in the U.S. House.
Voters may cast their ballots between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. weekdays through Aug. 15 at City Hall assembly chambers, said Sarah Merritt, state elections worker in Wrangell.
“You never have to give a reason” to vote early, Merritt said.
Voters can choose to vote early if they will be out of town on election day, or want to avoid the busier day at the polling booths, or just find it more convenient to vote during the two weeks before election day.
On election day Aug. 16, polling places will be open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Nolan Center.
Voters are advised to bring either their state voter ID card or other identification for early voting or on election day, Merritt said.
The Aug. 16 ballot is two-sided, with one side listing the names of three candidates to fill Young’s term until the new Congress convenes in January. The choices are Republicans Nick Begich and former Gov. Sarah Palin, and Democrat Mary Peltola.
This will be Alaska’s first ranked-choice election, with voters able to list the three candidates in order of preference.
“You choose your top choice, but then you also have the opportunity to follow up with a second choice and a third choice,” said Amanda Moser, chief strategy officer for Alaskans for Better Elections, the organization that advocated for the elections law change approved by voters in 2020.
Ranked-choice voting provides for immediate, automatic runoff counts if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. It eliminates the last-place finisher and moves to the second choice on those voters’ ballots, adding their numbers to the remaining candidates until someone gets more than half the votes.
In a public opinion poll conducted by Alaska Survey Research, pollster Ivan Moore found that Democrat Peltola would likely not be eliminated in the first round of voting in the special U.S. House race, with conservative voters divided between Palin and Begich.
The probability of Peltola being eliminated in the first round “is like, zero,” Moore said.
If Moore’s poll is accurate and voter sentiment does not change in the next few weeks, voters who cast ballots for Palin or Begich, whichever comes in last, would have their votes moved to their second choice. If enough Palin and Begich supporters stick with a Republican as their second choice, the second-place candidate would overcome Peltola’s first-round lead and win the election.
The other side of the Aug. 16 paper ballot is for the primary election, where voters again will see Peltola, Palin and Begich listed, along with 19 other candidates for a full two-year term as Alaska’s only member of the U.S. House, a job Young held for 49 years.
Voters can choose only one candidate in the primary.
The top four finishers from the primary will move to the Nov. 8 general election, under the same ranked-choice selection process.
In addition to the U.S. House race, the Aug. 16 primary ballot will include the governor’s race, with incumbent Gov. Mike Dunleavy facing former Gov. Bill Walker, former Anchorage Democratic legislator Les Gara, and seven other Republican, Libertarian, Alaskan Independence Party and undeclared candidates. The top four will advance to November.
Incumbent U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski faces a reelection challenge from Republican and former Dunleavy administration official Kelley Tshibaka and 17 other candidates in the Senate primary.
In the state House race, incumbent Rep. Dan Ortiz, of Ketchikan, has two challengers — so all three will advance from the primary to the general election. The district includes Wrangell.
Ortiz, an independent, was first elected to the House in 2014. He currently serves as vice chair of the budget-writing House Finance Committee.
His challengers are Ketchikan Republican Jeremy Bynum and Wrangell non-partisan candidate Shevaun Meggitt.
Meggitt, who flies a Boeing 777 for a cargo airline, graduated Wrangell High School in 1987, later returning to the community to live while she commutes for mostly international freight flights.
“I’ve always paid attention to politics,” she said in an interview last month, though she had not been looking to run for office.
The government’s response to COVID-19 “was insanity,” she said. “I can’t sit on the sidelines anymore,” adding, “This kind of government overreach cannot be tolerated.”
There are just two candidates for the state Senate district that represents Wrangell: Incumbent Republican Bert Stedman, of Sitka, who has been in the Legislature since 2003 and currently serves as co-chair of the budget-writing Senate Finance Committee; and Mike Sheldon, of Petersburg.
Sheldon’s campaign website says: “We must wake up this nation, including Alaska, or lose our freedoms from a bunch of liars and actors who say one thing and do another.”
Both Stedman and Sheldon will advance from the primary to the Nov. 8 general election ballot.
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