(Editor’s note: Report as of 10:30 pm Tuesday, results not final)
School Board District 3 conservative incumbent Kathy McCollum appears to have easily won reelection in Tuesday’s local Matanuska-Susitna Borough election. She was leading 995 to 484.
In the School Board District 6 race, conservative incumbent Ole Larson was outpacing union-backed, and Democat-financed Dianne Shibe, 1,125 to 826 at 10:30 pm.
Assembly Seat 4 incumbent Rob Yundt was unopposed, and had 632 votes.
Assembly Seat 5 incumbent Mokie Tew was holding even for the first hour of counting but apparently lost a lot of support in the Big Lake District, and challenger Bill Gamble pulled ahead. The vote is 751 for Gamble to 529 for Tew.
Assembly Seat 6 incumbent Dmitri Fonov was winning with 1,021 votes. Trailing him was Stafford Glashan with 426, Kerby Coman with 227, and Jackson Abney with 179.
Proposition 1, the transportation bond, was passing 5,916 to 2,855.
The ballots are counted by hand in Mat-Su elections, and this is a new process, after the Assembly voted in September 2022 to return to hand counting of paper ballots, after having used machine counting for several years. The count went fairly quickly on election night.
There are 93,429 registered voters in the borough. In the recent Wasilla local election, the turnout was about 8%. The turnout in the borough, so far, is about 9.53%.
Earlier in the day, some students in the borough high schools staged their second walkout, an effort to convince voters that they need to have a voting role on the school board. That apparently didn’t sit well with voters in the school board races, where the conservatives are leading strongly.
Also on Tuesday, Mat-Su School Board member Jacob Butcher of District 5 resigned, as he is moving out of state. Butcher, a Republican, was serving until November, 2025 for the Big Lake to Point MacKenzie area.
These results will be updated Wednesday morning, so check back!
