THE ANCHORAGE DAILY PLANET
Good heavens! Has it really been 523 long days since dead people – yes, that’s right, dead people – lined up to cast ballots in the House District 15 GOP primary election in 2018? How time flies.
If you will recall those thrilling days of yesteryear, Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux, a staunch Republicrat and the District 15 incumbent, was facing a challenge from political unknown Aaron Weaver.
Election officials discovered seven absentee ballot applications — seven — from dead people, not to mention absentee votes cast in the names of at least two very much alive people who said they had not voted. Twenty-six ballots were yanked because of residency or legitimacy questions. All the ballots with residency or legitimacy questions, it is worth noting, were for LeDoux.
Despite all that, elections officials – apparently mistaking House District 15 for a Chicago ward – inexplicably certified the election and no official, as far as we know, has asked anything about the dead’s penchant for voting. That, mind you, despite Lt. Gov Kevin Meyer in December 2018 calling for an audit of the election system after “irregularities” in primary elections. Mum, apparently, is the word.
LeDoux, at the time of the primary not a favorite of the GOP after joining with Democrats to help hand them a majority in 2017 – and netting a powerful legislative post as a reward – went on to win the District 15 election. And then she defeated write-in candidate, Jake Sloan, a contractor, in the general election.
She worked with her new Democrat friends until she broke with them last year over paying Alaskans a full Permanent Fund dividend.
Well, now she has hooked up with the Democrat-led House majority again, and was given seats on the Joint Armed Services Committee and Judiciary Committee the other day for her trouble – and over the objections of 15 House members. She also was restored “points” allowing her to hire an extra staff, MustReadAlaska.com reports.
If nothing else, LeDoux has shown herself to be a survivor. It is no wonder dead people like her.
Most of the election weirdness in 2018 came from one Muldoon trailer park where some of Anchorage’s Hmong live. Lots of people appeared to be voting there, but showing the addresses of only a few trailers. When reporters asked why that was, folks there told them, “Ask Gabrielle.”
LeDoux reportedly paid one Charlie J. Chang, of Fresno, Calif., $10,000 to deliver votes from the Hmong community. What Chang, supposedly a translator and political strategist, did remains a question even now.
As questions about the election surfaced, LeDoux reported Chang dead in California a day or two after the primary.
None of that apparently sparked any interest among the powers that be. Officialdom just does not seem interested in dead people trying to vote or other “irregularities.”
Strange, don’t you think? 523 days and counting.