The Anchorage NAACP is demanding Sen. President Peter Micciche remove Sen. Mike Shower as the chairman of the Senate State Affairs Committee.
The group says that Shower’s introduction of Senate Bill 39 is a “brazen assault on Alaskans’ voting rights.” The president of the group has also called it a manifestation of white supremacy.
“Anyone who would dismantle Alaskans’ voting rights doesn’t deserve to chair the committee overseeing election issues,” said Kevin McGee, President of the Anchorage NAACP. “Senator Micciche needs to replace Senator Shower with a member who supports the democratic process.”
SB 39 is similar to a voting security bill that Shower proposed two years ago, to ensure that voting by mail is less prone to election fraud. That bill died after not receiving committee hearings.
McGee says SB 39 is a “local manifestation of the national white supremacist attack on voting rights, which included the recent violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.”
Shower said this morning that his bill was a starting point of a conversation that would lead to the final product, and he expects the bill to change as the Legislature gathers input. He objects to mass mailing of ballots to people who haven’t requested them, and he believes that Judge Dani Crosby compromised Alaska’s election security when she ruled that no witness signatures were required on absentee ballots. His bill would make ballot harvesting (the practice of scooping up ballots by a third party, as occurred with outside contractors during the 2020 election) illegal.
The current version of SB 39 is at this link.
An initial committee hearing on the bill is Thursday in the Senate State Affairs Committee.
