Fairbanks Assembly to hear Fletcher’s mail-in voting proposal at Aug. 8 meeting. Here’s what to know

On Thursday, Aug. 8, the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly will hear Resolution 2024-27, a matter that was originally to to be heard at the last Assembly meeting, but which was waylaid when the Assembly failed to complete its agenda. 

This resolution, sponsored by Assembly presiding officer (and Senate candidate) Savannah Fletcher, creates a committee of out of left-leaning community organizations to move the borough elections to mail-in voting. The mail-in ballot system of voting is already used to elect members to Golden Valley Electric Association, and mail-in elections are used in Anchorage and Juneau, among other places.

What is mail-in voting?

For those unfamiliar with mail-in voting, this is not the same as absentee voting. In absentee voting, the resident voter affirmatively applies for the ballot, receives the ballot, votes the ballot, has it witnessed, and returns the ballot. While not perfect, it does have a chain of custody. 

Mail-in voting is a system where ballots are mailed to everyone, and people return their ballots in the mail or to a drop box.  This system was used by the Alaska Division of Elections in 2020. The division mailed ballots to all eligible senior citizens in the state, under the auspices of not wanting to expose seniors to Covid in 2020.

There are significant issues with these mail-in elections.

The first issue is local control. Do the people of the Fairbanks North Star Borough want their elections controlled by cleverly chosen community groups (Get Out the Native Vote and League of Women Voters are the ones listed in the resolution) or cede control of their elections to other boroughs, the way Juneau ceded control of its mail-in elections to Anchorage when it started mail-in elections in 2020?

People in the FNSB, an independent bunch, will probably want  to retain control of their own elections, lest they become another Anchorage, controlled by Marxists on the Assembly. Yet the only cost effective means of utilizing mail-in voting is to farm it out to Anchorage. Juneau did that before deciding to pay $700,000 for its own vote-counting center, something used only once a year. The carrying costs for the city of 32,000 are absurd.

Second, Alaska has bloated voter rolls. A large part of the FNSB population is transient due to the military, university, tourism, and other reasons. When people move, they often forget to “unregister,” to vote. They are often more concerned about other matters than their voter registration. Ballots are going to arrive at their old address — you can take that to the bank.

In fact, one local storage unit business owner said that he has a very high return rate — nearly 80% of notices the business sends in the mail are returned. Many people often assume when they get to their new location, their registration at their new place will automatically unregister them from their old addresses. There is some chance of that happening if a person is moving within Alaska, but it often does not occur if the person is moving outside of Alaska. It can take years to remove a person from the voter rolls. This means hundreds of ballots will be unnecessarily printed, and money wasted on printing and postage.

The vote will be less secure. The result of these ballots being mailed out to everyone is that ballots are then available to the person who assumes the old address. Somes people put their ballot in the trash at the post office, and there are numerous stories of people walking into post offices and finding unvoted ballots in the trash. This leaves the chain of custody of the vote wide open and reduces the integrity of the election process.

The chain-of-custody issue is real. Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules highlights the chain-of-custody issues involved in using mail-in voting. Ballots can be stolen out of mail boxes and voted by others. Apartment complex trash cans will be filled with the ballots of past tenants. Ballots mailed to long -moved residents be acquired and voted. All of this undermines the confidence that people have in the election process. 

The cost savings are an illusion and do not hold up to the promise of increased voter participation. While some argue mail in ballots are cheaper than hiring election judges, the postage and printing costs are not cheap. In Anchorage, there is hardly any difference in the cost per ballot, between the old system of voting at the polls and the mail system and participation rates have hardly changed. Staffing call-in lines and help centers is also not cheap. For the voter, this can be very time consuming; some voters recently spent hours on the phone with the help line at GVEA mail-in election.

Tale of Two Concurrent Elections

 Two different elections held over a similar geography and time frame recently occured to provide a stark contrast: The FNSB special election on May 7 and the GVEA Election. 

The May 7 election was undertaken with voting at the polls, early voting, and absentee voting. 

The GVEA election was mail-in voting. According to its website, GVEA has 36,176 members, and in the borough-wide election, 4,063 ballots were cast on either side of the by-law vote. Assuming each member received one ballot, that is an 11% participation rate. Granted, the by-law issue was not as compelling as tax hike, but that is still pretty low, and much lower than typical borough elections. 

The May 7 election had the highest turn out in 10 years: 23.4%, with over 76,000 ballots cast. This would seem to suggest that a move to mail-in voting would result in significantly lower voter turn out. 

The cost of the GVEA election was greater than the May 7 special election cost. Excluding media spending by the FNSB school district, which was not unsubstantial, the FNSB had allocated $125,000 for the special election. That included printing, staff time, paying election workers, and other costs related to the election. 

In contrast, GVEA spends roughly $25,000 in printing and mailing ballots per district.  Of the 7 GVEA districts, 6 are squarely in the FNSB borough. That means GVEA actually spends more than the borough on elections, and achieves half the participation rate. 

If the objective is to increase voter turnout in the FNSB, it seems clear mail-in voting would be detrimental to voter participation and is provably more costly to implement. If the objective is indeed to increase voter turnout, mail-in voting is not the solution. It may be right for some communities, but experiences in Anchorage and Juneau should be instructive: It will absolutely cost more money.  It may result in the same or lower voter turnout. The ballots will be less secure. 

Readers who wish to weigh in on the resolution can write their Fairbanks borough assembly at [email protected]  or call the borough clerk at 907 459 1401 to sign up to testify in person or by phone.