No sooner had the Alaska Legislature voted to not confirm Bethany Marcum as a regent for the University of Alaska, Gov. Mike Dunleavy turned around and reappointed her to the Alaska Redistricting Board.
Marcum had resigned from the redistricting board when she was named to the Board of Regents last year. She was a regent until a legislative confirmation or denial. The liberal majority of the Alaska Senate voted against her and swung the vote of a joint session on Tuesday, and she was officially off the Board of Regents.
Marcum served on the Alaska Redistricting Board during the 2021-2022 redistricting process. That’s the political process for redrawing the House and Senate political lines after every U.S. Census. Some legislators who spoke against her in the joint session of the Legislature on Tuesday said her work on the redistricting board played a big factor in their decision.
Marcum recognized that the job was to draw lines fairly for districts, but in the end the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Democrats, who accused Marcum of trying to swing districts toward Republican voters. It was the justices themselves who gerrymandered Alaska to favor the party that has only half of the registered voters that the Republican Party has.
The board is set to meet on Monday at 1 pm to go over the justices’ decisions, and to deliberate whether there is a route to push back on the judicial activism, as well as to determine the settlement amounts to the Democrat stakeholders who sued the board successfully, with the help of the Alaska Supreme Court’s liberal makeup. The board meets at the Anchorage Legislative Information Offices on Benson Blvd. at Minnesota Drive.
Marcum is the executive director of the conservative policy think tank Alaska Policy Forum.
