While most of the western Alaska villages voted for Democrat nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris for president, there were some anomalies in the villages. A surprising number of rural Alaska precincts actually voted majority for Trump, not Harris, as this story details:
Kipnuk is one of those anomalies, but it didn’t go for Trump or Harris.
For president, Kamala Harris received only 2 votes from Kipnuk. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a registered independent, received 40 votes, and Cornel West, the radical Democrat Socialist running under the Aurora Party, also received 50 votes. Donald Trump received only 5 votes. Libertarian Chase Oliver received 5 votes. Green Party Jill Stein received one vote.
But in the U.S. House race, somehow Nick Begich won Kipnuk with 66 votes, while Rep. Mary Peltola, the area’s hometown hero, only got 11 votes, and incarcerated felon Democrat Eric Hafner received more than twice what Peltola got, at 29 votes.
Kipnuk, on the Kugkaktlik River, consists mostly Yupik-speaking Eskimos. Most people who work there are employed by government or government-funded tribal organizations.
The village had 113 ballots cast in the Nov. 5 election, out of 455 total registered voters. The turnout in Kipnuk, which is in Alaska House District 38, was 24.84%.
The high votes for West and Kennedy stand out. West is not exactly a household name in Alaska. Statewide, West only receive 913 votes and Kennedy received 4,348 votes.
That means 5.5% of West’s votes came from a village that represents .04% of the voters.
Compare that to the nearby village of Kwigillingok, where 81 votes were cast out of 237 registered voters.
In Kwig, Harris received 25 votes, Kennedy received no votes, Trump received 51 votes, and Oliver got 1 vote. Stein had no votes. In Kwig, Cornel West received no votes.
Another nearby village of Chefornak had 96 votes cast out of 321 registered voters. Harris received 66, Kennedy received 8, Trump received 17 votes. Again, in Chefornak, West got zero votes for president.
West, who has switched from various third parties over the years, stopped campaigning in August when his campaign announced it was $17,000 in debt, but he had already qualified for the Alaska ballot and did not withdraw. In other states, he is on ballots under the Justice for All Party, or other similar low-enrollment parties, such as in Vermont, where he appeared on the ballot under the Green Mountain Peace and Justice Party. Read more about Cornel West at Ballotpedia.
Why Kipnuk had just two votes for Harris, but 50 votes for West is one of those mysteries that can’t be easily explained to those who haven’t been around Alaska for long. In a deeply rural area, there is little oversight with voting and village officials can do all kinds of things to ballots without being detected. Rural Alaska voting has a checkered history of voting anomalies.
In Shungnak in 2016, there were 100 ballots cast in the primary election, even though there were only 50 registered voters in the village. Must Read Alaska was the first to identify the fraudulent voting. The voting clerk had given everyone two ballots.
In Buckland in 2016, there were more “personal representative” special-needs ballots cast than in all of Wasilla. The ballots did not even arrive in Nome until six days after the election and appeared to be fraudulent. Many other examples of likely voter fraud were identified in the 2016 election in rural Alaska.
Fire Nancy “Done Nothing”. An example of not policing the fundamental responsibility of the number 2 in charge.
Again “Done Nothing” lives up to her namesake.
The village should retain him as local administrator and see how it works.
Administrator of what? Complaint department?
“Must Read Alaska was the first to identify the fraudulent voting”.
Which is another reason, within a long list of reasons, why MRAK is an extremely valuable resource for Akaska. In this case doing the work the DOE should be automatically monitoring and adjudicating.
It also confirms how incompetent and dysfunctional our State Division of Elections is.
Is it simply a product of the systematic norm of inability for state/fed agencies to perform at any task they are charged with?
Or is the bureaucratic ice fog of confusion created to be exploited and manipulated to reach electoral outcomes beneficial for specific interest groups?
Sad to say, but many villages survive almost soley on wealth redistribution since they have no tax base to pay for schools or power.
Comment about dependency of communities could refer to many places in Alaska and, indeed, the entire state, given Alaska’s fantastic dependency on federal transfer payments for a huge hunk of our states operating and capital budget.
Gotta hand it to those villagers. Some must have renewed their subscription to MRAK. No need to spell Murkowski when RCV suddenly vanishes in another week or so. Condolences and post mortems can be sent to Peltola at the Bethel pot dispensary.
Yikes!
This is very disturbing. How do we fix it?
Dont be so critical on these village elections.
Who knows? Maybe Cornel West chartered a flight to Kipnuk to focus his campaign?
If so He should have tapped them all…..
With our grossly inflated voter rolls how can we really assess turnout?
What’s done in the village stays in the village!
What’s done in the village stays in the village!
We all know that. Especially the inebriates in the dry villages.
Could be that the “Aurora Party” got them interested, thinking he was Alaskan, but who knows???
Not a lot of NeoCons and shimmy banker and lawyer types in the villages, eh? What a shock.
The listerine seems to be flowing nicely
Wonder if they know where their votes went? ….
So wait: 40, 50, 5, 5? So 100 broken down by very unusually round and level based numbers? Lol thats sure to be legit.
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