{"id":1471013,"date":"2022-05-11T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1471013"},"modified":"2022-05-11T08:00:49","modified_gmt":"2022-05-11T12:00:49","slug":"alaskas-special-election-is-a-template-for-how-the-left-wants-to-rig-the-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/alaskas-special-election-is-a-template-for-how-the-left-wants-to-rig-the-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaska\u2019s Special Election Is A Template For How The Left Wants To Rig The Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Falaskas-special-election-is-a-template-for-how-the-left-wants-to-rig-the-vote%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1471013&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/brown-bears.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Next month, Alaskans will vote in a special primary election for the state\u2019s single congressional seat, left vacant by the death of Republican Rep. Don Young in March. Young, the longest-serving Republican in the history of the U.S. House, was Alaska\u2019s sole congressman for 49 years, so the election to replace him is in some ways an historic event for the state.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s also historic in another way: it will be Alaska\u2019s first ever statewide mail-in primary election. That is, there will be no in-person voting at all. Every single voter on the state\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alaskawatchman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Alaska-report.pdf\">bloated and error-riddled voter rolls<\/a>\u00a0was automatically mailed a blank ballot.<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s more, there will be no verification requirements for these mail-in ballots. Voters will simply need to fill out their ballot and have a witness observe them sign the envelope. The state\u2019s Division of Election has explicitly said\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alaskawatchman.com\/2022\/03\/26\/alaska-will-not-verify-voter-signatures-in-first-ever-statewide-mail-in-election\/\">it will not verify the authenticity of the signatures<\/a>\u00a0on the ballots. <\/p>\n<p>Normally, to vote by mail in Alaska you have to submit an absentee ballot application ahead of time, which includes a signature that can be used to verify the signature on the completed ballot. But not for this special mail-in election, which is already a chaotic and confusing mess, with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elections.alaska.gov\/Core\/candidatelistspecprim.php\">48 names on the primary ballot<\/a>\u00a0and a new ranked-choice voting process in place that will send the top four vote-getters from the primary to the in-person general special election in August (which is on the same day as the regular statewide primary election for the November midterms).<\/p>\n<p>By any measure, Alaska\u2019s special election is a mess. But why should the rest of the country care? Because Alaska\u2019s insane statewide mail-in election is a template for how the left wants to run elections nationwide. Democrats and left-wing activists would love nothing more than to hold elections entirely by mail with as few safeguards in place to prevent ballot fraud.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, Alaska presents a unique and in some ways ideal test case for the left. For one thing,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alaskawatchman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Alaska-report.pdf\">Alaska\u2019s voter rolls are a mess<\/a>. As of 2020, voter registration was 118 percent of the estimated vote age population, meaning there were more registered voters than actual people who could vote (this problem is getting worse in Alaska; in 2018 it was only 103 percent). Making matters worse is a 2016 Alaska law that automatically registers residents to vote when they submit an application for the state\u2019s permanent fund dividend.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to make an election less secure, you pair bloated voter rolls with mass mail-in voting and then strip all safeguards and verification requirements from the mail-in ballots, which is exactly what Alaska has done.<\/p>\n<p>The state government\u2019s weak excuse for conducting a statewide mail-in election is that, because a special election must be held within 90 days of the vacancy (in this case, Young\u2019s death on March 18) there simply wasn\u2019t time to hire and train the 3,000 poll workers a standard in-person election would require. But even if you buy that, the state has not yet explained why it decided to conduct the mail-in election without any mechanism to verify the authenticity of the signatures on the ballots.<\/p>\n<p>On top of all this, the special primary election next month and the special general election in August will be the first election cycle in Alaska that employs ranked-choice voting, which voters approved in 2020.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to imagine an election scenario more ill-suited to such a convoluted and confusing scheme than this special election, partly because voters will be choosing among an unheard of 48 candidates in the special mail-in primary election and partly because the special in-person general election will take place on the same day \u2014\u00a0<em>and perhaps even on the same ballot\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 as the regular primary. (The special election is to choose someone to serve out the remaining months of Young\u2019s current term, the regular general election is to choose the state\u2019s next at-large congressman.)<\/p>\n<p>As Sarah Montalbano of the Alaska Policy Forum\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/alaskawatchman.com\/2022\/05\/09\/alaskas-congressional-special-election-disgrace\/\">noted recently<\/a>\u00a0in the Alaska Watchman, that means \u201cthe bifurcated ballot will have both a special election chosen by [ranked-choice voting] and a general primary election instructing voters to choose only one!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Montalbano calls Alaska\u2019s special election a \u201cperfect storm,\u201d and for anyone concerned about election integrity and fairness, it certainly is a perfect storm. But for anyone who wants to make elections as unsecure and as open to fraud as possible, what\u2019s about to happen in Alaska is ideal. <\/p>\n<p>It represents the institutionalization of the extraordinary changes to absentee voting in some states during the 2020 presidential election amid fears of in-person voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Those changes, which got rid of nearly every safeguard for mail-in voting, were supposed to be temporary, necessitated by the pandemic.<\/p>\n<p>But the left never lets a crisis go to waste, which is why we\u2019re about to see in Alaska\u2019s special election a dry-run for what Democrats would like to do nationwide: use every trick in the book to make our elections less secure.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Next month, Alaskans will vote in a special primary election for the state\u2019s single congressional seat, left vacant by the death of Republican Rep. Don Young in March. Young, the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":518,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1471013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1471013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1471013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1471013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1471013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1471013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}