ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS SNUBS ‘ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE’

In an editorial published Saturday that slapped Alaskans in the face, the Anchorage Daily News turned its back on “one person, one vote,” and endorsed the machinations of Ballot Measure 2, which most analysts say will help liberal candidates get a stronger toehold in the state.

Critics say ranked choice voting gives some voters more votes than others, depending on how many they rank on the ballot and whether their ballot becomes “exhausted” during the counting process, which is all done by computer programmed to sort and reassign votes.

The measure on the Nov. 3 ballot also destroys the ability of Alaskans to effectively form political parties and platforms, because it takes primaries wide open.

The measure is backed by nearly 100 percent of funds from Outside liberal groups to set up an election system that clearly favors liberals. Or, as the editorial board of the ADN benignly describes it “most of the money financing the ‘yes’ side of the campaign has itself come from Outside.”

“Our elections are not serving us well,” the editorial board waxed.

That’s because radical leftists and promise-breakers are not competing well. Democrats are competing so poorly that they now try to run away from the Democrat Party just to get people to vote for them.

That’s not the system that’s broken — that is the Alaska Democratic Party, now so radical that even clearly Democrat candidates for U.S. Senate and House try to trick voters into thinking they are independents.

The editorial board believes Alaskans are stupid, and don’t vote for the candidates that the newspaper thinks they should be voting for. The paper clearly believes the new system will produce the kind of results the elites in the news business want to see, not the results Alaskans want.

Ballot Measure 2 is three paragraphs long but represents 25 pages and 75 sections of legislation that its liberal backers say would improve Alaska’s election system.

Those 25 pages were written by two Alaskans: Scott Kendall and Libby Bakalar. On Friday during a recorded debate, Kendall for the first time disclosed the name of the co-author of the measure.

Bakalar was fired by the Dunleavy Administration and has an active lawsuit against the administration for wrongful termination. She runs a far left blog and is an overachieving Twitter commenter who espouses leftist positions.

The entire selling point of the measure by these two liberal lawyers is to eliminate dark money, but it wasn’t until four days before the election that the group calling itself Alaskans for Better Elections disclosed who actually wrote the ballot measure. Not very transparent.

The ranked choice voting idea is so bad that even California Gov. Jerry Brown had vetoed a bill that would have expanded it, calling it “overly complicated and confusing” because it “deprives voters of genuinely informed choice.”

In ranked-choice voting, you don’t vote just for the candidate you want. You rank the candidates according to who you can settle for, from 1-4.

If no candidate wins a majority of #1 votes, all the ballots get reshuffled, and those with the fewest votes drop off, and that vote gets reassigned, according to a complicated formula. If you don’t pick a second choice, your ballot is exhausted and thrown out. Those who did pick a second, third, and fourth choice get to vote more than once.

On Friday, Defend Alaska Elections issued their own editorial, in the form of a YouTube video, demonstrating how Alaskans are being outspent and outplayed by Outsiders trying to take over the state and how they are fighting back:

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s Chief of Staff Ben Stevens this week asked Senate President Cathy Giessel and House Speaker Bryce Edgmon if they plan to extend the health emergency declaration the Legislature passed in March.

The Declaration of Public Health Emergency Disaster, authorized by SB 241, ends on Nov. 15, and it takes legislative action to extend it.

The emergency powers allowed the governor to create orders that at times shut down parts of the economy, as he did early in the COVID-19 outbreak; enact safety measures, such as mobilizing resources to Bristol Bay for the fishing season; and move health resources where they need to go to meet the challenge of the highly contagious virus.

The Dunleavy Administration, for instance, was able to relax regulations so that people on public assistance health programs can access their doctors through telemedicine, something that is normally prohibited.

In a letter exchange between Stevens and the legislative leaders, Stevens reminded them that in two weeks the emergency declaration expire, and asked if they had polled their members to consider convening a Special Session on extending the declaration.

“If so, the Office of the Governor would like to know the outcome of that poll,” Stevens wrote.

They had not. But they shot a letter back immediately saying that that was only because he had not asked them to.

Giessel and Edgmon also wrote they would be “happy” to poll their members but would need the governor’s help to get to the 40-vote threshold needed to call the members back to Juneau.

That’s unlikely to happen. A number of Republicans are not interested in going back to Juneau to allow Democrats to use the time to try to override vetoes.

And it doesn’t appear the governor, by calling for a special session himself, would want to force legislators to travel to Juneau in the middle of November, with COVID-19 cases surging at numbers not seen before in Alaska.

That leaves another option: The governor can let the disaster declaration expire, and then issue a 30-day emergency declaration without the Legislature, which would extend his authority to mobilize resources on a month-to-month basis. This could continue for a while, or at least until the Legislature is back in session in mid-January.

In the original bill for the declaration of public health emergency disaster, the governor asked the Disaster Declaration be extended to March 12, 2021 — a full year. That didn’t fly with the Legislature. The Senate’s version of the bill, under Senate President Giessel, cut the emergency delegation short to Sept. 1, 2020. But Speaker Bryce Edgmon said there were too many unknowns, and the declaration was ultimately extended to Nov. 15.

A new disaster declaration, handled in 30-day increments, could help maintain what is currently in place to slow the spread of the virus, and allow the medical community to meet the needs of patients who need critical care. It would allow the governor to maintain the Emergency Operations Center, testing at airports, and getting testing kits, equipment, masks and gloves to where they are needed most.

Most Must Read Alaska readers don’t follow MSNBC on a regular basis, but we do, so you don’t have to.

On Meet the Press, Jessica Taylor of Cook Political Report commented that the race for U.S. Senate in Alaska is one to watch:

“This is a race that we, I think, don’t know on election night because literally they have to bring in some of the ballots by dog sled.”

Uh, no. Not really. These are the experts?

“Popping in here…we do not bring in ballots by dog sled. Confirmed this with our Region IV supervisor and also with the division’s Director of Dog Relations, Gary Bark Jr,.” quipped the Division of Elections on Twitter, where the Division runs what is arguably the most entertaining Twitter feed in Alaska.

Most prognosticators believe U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan is ahead, even though Alan Gross has spent $25 million to unseat him. Like any other race, it matters that conservative voters show up and not take it for granted.

Cook Political Report has rated this race “Lean Republican.”

Glenda Ledford won the runoff election for mayor of the City of Wasilla. The election is being certified tonight, Oct. 30.

The final tally was Ledford 411, and Doug Holler 350.

“This is my opportunity to serve my community,” Ledford said. “We will stay open for business, keep our neighborhoods safe, and support jobs in our community.”  

It appears to be an open-and-shut case of photo-doctoring.

An earlier version of the door-hanger showing Senate candidate Alan Gross walking on a dock in the photoshopped rain caught the eye of several Alaskans: His zipper was down. Really down — as seen on the photo at left, above.

These things happen, but rarely in political campaign advertising. Gross, a millionaire doctor, has a multi-million-dollar campaign going, one of the most expensive in state history, and the best ad agencies money can buy.

Now, through the miracle of Photoshop tools, the jeans are zipped up in the current version of the flyer.

Gross’ ad doctoring is one example of just how easy it is to make things right — or at least better than reality — with tools available to designers.

“Pity the poor ad guy who had to zip up Gross’ pants,” noted one eagle-eyed critic. “But at least, unlike [Mayor] Ethan Berkowitz, he had pants on, even if they weren’t zipped.”

They’re here.

“I just had someone asking for my husband by his first legal name, soliciting to seek if we were voting, specifically for Al Gross just about 5 minutes ago. I thought it wasn’t allowed to solicit in the neighborhood? Also….it’s 8pm? I find this super abnormal,” wrote a woman from the Bayshore area of Anchorage.

She isn’t the only one being pestered. Others report being asked for their ballots by out-of-staters who come to their doors.

They know who you are and they know how you typically vote, thanks to Big Tech.

The canvassers are for the Alan Gross campaign, and they’ve been flown in from all over the country. Some of them are staying at a midtown hotel, while others have been put up at the Captain Cook hotel, with an open meal and bar tab. They are being paid a stipend to crawl through neighborhoods and harvest ballots.

The ballot harvesting is creepy, said one Anchorage man who lives in the downtown area. A pair of Gross volunteers from Wisconsin showed up at his door, asked him if he was planning to vote, and when he said he had an absentee ballot, but had not decided if he was going to vote it or vote in person, the two offered to take that ballot and drop it off at a polling station for him. He is elderly, but was not addled and was not about to hand his ballot over.

Downtown Anchorage is prime hunting grounds for ballot harvesters, as it is heavily Democrat. The practice is not illegal, but may raise questions about whether those ballots ever make it to their intended destinations.

“Don’t give your ballot to anybody that you don’t know,” said Randy Ruedrich, former chairman of the Alaska Republican Party. “Paid visitors are not expected to do you a favor.”

Gross volunteers from out of state have been at it for weeks, first asking people to fill out absentee ballot applications, and trying to get them to hand those application over to them, and now going through their preprogrammed lists to get the ballots themselves from those who have not voted.