By SEN. MIKE SHOWER
As a state senator, I have been working on election reform legislation for many years.
While I have never taken the position that election fraud was so prevalent that a single election result in Alaska was changed, a few things solidified my strong belief we must pursue election reform.
First, it’s clear the Americans across the political spectrum no longer have faith our elections are fair or secure. If their side didn’t win it wasn’t because the other candidate was better, but because there was cheating, fraud or other malicious actions that “stole” the election. The distrust of our election system is at the highest point in history.
Second, through a great deal of research and painstaking work, we discovered a number of vulnerabilities in our Alaska election system that we need to address.
Some examples:
A few years ago, we had at least two cyber-attacks, which stole the data of 113,000 Alaskans. We Alaskans were told about this after the election was over.
Personal information was stolen and is still on the dark web, which could be used for any manner of nefarious activity, including registering someone to vote without his or her knowledge.
The state would not be able to understand the extent of the problem without a true forensic audit. Alaska has the most over-inflated voter rolls in the nation. This is a nationally acknowledged fact by our own state and organizations in the Lower 48 that track such data.
Part of that problem is automatic voter registration when filing for a Permanent Fund dividend. I’ll get to that in a moment.
The entire division of elections website was partially hacked in 2016 and was under the control of a “hacker” who was simply waiting for someone to pay him for the access. Watch the HBO documentary “Kill Chain,” to hear from the hacker who did it.
We have no ballot chain-of-custody protocols or tracking system to ensure we know where ballots go, who gets them, and then ensure every one of them comes back to a central location for counting and storage. We allow unused ballots to be destroyed in districts vs. accounting for them in a central location. The Division of Elections doesn’t check for U.S. citizenship. From what I know of the infamous “Tshibaka” report, we haven’t always checked the Dominion machines, as we are supposed to, for security and functionality.
Speaking of that report. I have asked for it since it was briefed to higher-up elected officials in July of 2020. In the over 30-page report, then Administration Commissioner Kelly Tshibaka highlighted three and a half pages of items we need to fix or do better. I was given a “redacted” copy of the report to read. All three and a half pages of those recommendations were blacked out.
I was stunned. A state senator was asking for a publicly funded report so I could do my job better and provide appropriate legislative solutions, but was being denied access to it.
I was offered a chance to read it but had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This means if I talk about anything in the report the state could sue me for violating the agreement.
That was an impossible position, since the entire goal of reading it was to use the data to draft legislation to address the findings.
There is more, but I think you get the point. Our election system isn’t perfect and there are vulnerabilities we need to address.
Yesterday I had a constituent reach out to me about a recent social media post of mine regarding the “loophole” first reported on by Must Read Alaska. This loophole is what happens when people are automatically registered to vote when filing for a Permanent Fund dividend. The constituent is part of an organization that is helping Ukrainian refugees trying to settle in the United States with the goal of eventually applying for citizenship.
These immigrants understand quite well that a non-citizen cannot register to vote, as it’s illegal. If any of these Ukrainians were registered to vote and then apply for U.S. citizenship, the immigration officials will easily discover their voter registration, and their request will most likely be denied.
This group is helping advise and help these Ukrainian people with all of their paperwork, applications, etc. Even though the immigrants were all advised to check “no” on the dividend application question about whether they wanted to be automatically registered to vote, virtually all of them received voter registration cards.
Houston, we have a problem.
Remember the automatic voter registration ballot initiative that was installed by Democrats and left wing outside dark money in Alaska in 2016? That’s one of the election vulnerabilities in Alaska. There is real, concrete evidence that people are being hurt by this automatic voter registration.
I don’t believe the state has any idea how many people have been automatically registered since 2016. Some forget, don’t care, move to another state, etc. We don’t require people to unregister with the state and Alaska has a large transient population.
Then we send thousands of ballot applications to these people, without knowing if they are alive, registered in another state, or anything else. Who gets those applications? What about ballot harvesting? We allow that, too — another vulnerability.
Ironically, I had a bill that included this fix. It was stopped by Democrats a few years ago in the House. A clean, simple voter roll cleanup bill, filed by Rep Sarah Vance (R) of Homer this last session, was another chance to fix part of the problem. Unfortunately, it was effectively killed by Sen. Scott Kawasaki (D) in the Senate when he hijacked it and turned it into an omnibus bill with a plethora of Democrat wishes.
Alaska, we need to fix this, not in a few years, but right now. It is unconscionable for us to allow people like these immigrants who are doing the right thing to be harmed because of an ill-conceived law on the books.
Let’s repeal this automatic voter registration, fix the loopholes, and close up such vulnerabilities so we can all rest assured we have a world-class, trusted election system.
Sen. Mike Shower represents Wasilla Senate District O, formerly known as District E.