Democrats in high places in Alaska are unhappy that 1,303 ballots mailed in by presumed Democrat voters in the 2024 general election were not counted. They were rejected by officials for having one or more indicators of fraudulent voting.
The ballots didn’t have proper witness signatures or identification, which Democrats believe is inherently unfair. Rather than create education accountability measures to ensure Alaska’s voters are literate by the time they can vote, Democrats yearn for a law that would eliminate the witness signature requirement altogether.
Some 340,981 voters cast ballots in November’s election. The 1,303 ballots that were mailed in and rejected as illegal ballots represent less than 1/2 of 1% of the overall ballots. Many of the bad ballots came from rural Alaska, where literacy rates are lower and where election fraud has been detected numerous times in recent years (Buckland and Shungnak, and Kipnuk).
Of those ballots, over 520 had “insufficient or improper witnessing,” which means the voter did not have someone else sign the ballot envelope as a witness. That’s 40% of the 1,303 rejected ballots.
Fully 11% of the rejected were from people trying to game the system by mailing their ballots in after Election Day.
Another 13% of the rejected ballots didn’t have proper identification, such as the voter’s date of birth voter ID number or last four digits of their Social Security number. Some of these may have been illegal ballots mailed in by nonvoters who accessed the ballots in places like Post Office trash cans.
And 8% of the rejected ballots didn’t have a voter signature. Why? Possibly because these were more trash can voters, picking up ballots that had been tossed and filling them out.
Sen. Bill Wielechowski told the Anchorage Daily News that it’s “reprehensible” for ballot to be rejected for “dumb bureaucratic reasons, meaningless reasons,” and he will fill legislation to allow voters to “cure” or correct their ballots. Such a curing process would likely extend the already dragged-out election process. Ranked-choice voting already extends the time when election results can be known to Nov. 30, and with a built-in timeframe for recount requests, the elections are not completed for well over one month after Election Day. Allowing for a timeframe to correct ballots would burden an already burdensome election system that has become a national poster child for “what not to do.”
