Republican candidate Jeremy Bynum received just under half the votes in the Aug. 20 primary election for state House District 1, easily outpolling two independent candidates in a preview of the Nov. 5 general election.
The three candidates are competing to replace Rep. Dan Ortiz, who is retiring for health reasons after 10 years in the Legislature.
The district covers Ketchikan, Metlakatla and Wrangell, plus Coffman Cove on Prince of Wales Island.
All three candidates live in Ketchikan, whose larger population dominates the district. About 2,000 of the 2,527 votes cast in the primary came from Ketchikan and neighboring Saxman.
A Wrangell resident has not held the House seat since Peggy Wilson a decade ago.
Turnout in the primary was light, at just under 17% of registered voters, though that number may rise slightly as the final absentee ballots are received and counted before the deadline on Friday, Aug. 30.
The turnout among Wrangell voters was just over 16%, with 314 ballots cast.
As of last week, totals from the Alaska Division of Elections showed Bynum with 1,253 votes (49.98%). Grant EchoHawk received 669 votes (26.69%) and Agnes Moran had 585 votes (23.33%).
Under Alaska’s top-four primary system and ranked-choice voting, Bynum, EchoHawk and Moran all will appear on the Nov. 5 general election ballot, unless a candidate decides to withdraw from the race.
In the November election, voters will rank the candidates one through three. The candidate who gets more than 50% of first-choice votes will win, unless no one reaches that threshold in the first count, in which case the third-place finisher will be eliminated and the votes recounted between the top two candidates to determine the winner.
Wrangell voters turned out stronger for Bynum than the district as a whole. The community went for Bynum 58.7%, with 28% for EchoHawk and 13.2% for Moran.
Bynum told the Ketchikan Daily News that although he would have liked to see a higher voter turnout districtwide, the results were “better than what we had anticipated.”
EchoHawk told the newspaper that for a “first run at the state seat," coming in second is “great.”
Moran said she was “disappointed” with the primary election results. “We were expecting to hopefully take second, but we took third,” she told the Ketchikan newspaper. “We’ll have to think about that a little bit.”
Moran ran unsuccessfully for the state House in 2014. Bynum ran against Ortiz and lost in 2022.
Bynum is a Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly member and Ketchikan Public Utilities electric manager; EchoHawk also is a member of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough assembly and a business loan specialist with the Tongass Federal Credit Union; Moran is executive director of Women in Safe Homes and a former Ketchikan borough assembly member.
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