The Alaska Division of Elections took a laissez-faire approach to the Official Election Pamphlet this year, not reaching out to the Trump campaign with information about deadlines and fees, and publishing the official booklet without the top of the Republican ticket.
The Division of Elections says it reached out to the Republican Party for Trump’s address, but received no reply, so took no further action to reach the Republican nominee for president.
That’s OK for some perhaps, but nationally, it has been egg on the face of the Division of Elections. The explanation was inadequate and the Must Read Alaska posting about it is the highest nationally read item in the five month history of this news and opinion website, with thousands of hits. No legitimate effort was made to provide voters with a complete pamphlet.
Here’s the Trump / Pence election pamphlet statement voters might have seen. It’s not official, but it will do in a pinch. We’ve condensed it from his official website:
DONALD J. TRUMP
Donald J. Trump is the very definition of the American success story, continually setting the standards of excellence while expanding his businesses over many years. He is a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance. An accomplished author, Mr. Trump has authored over fifteen bestsellers, and his first book, The Art of the Deal, is considered a business classic and one of the most successful business books of all time.
During the 2014 political cycle, Mr. Trump was a top contributor and fundraiser for Republican efforts. Mr. Trump also campaigned across the country, with each candidate winning by a record margin.
Mr. Trump frequently uses this platform to advocate for Conservative causes, Republican candidates and to educate the public on the failures of the Obama administration. Mr. Trump devotes much of his time to media interviews in order to promote a free market, the importance of a strong family, a culture of life, a strong military and our country’s sacred obligation to take care of our veterans and their families.
Mr. Trump has long been a devoted supporter of veteran causes. In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of World War II, only 100 spectators watched New York City’s Veterans Day Parade. It was an insult to all veterans. Approached by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the chief of New York City’s FBI office, Mr. Trump agreed to lead as Grand Marshall a second parade later that year. Mr. Trump made a $1 million matching donation to finance the Nation’s Day Parade. On Saturday, November 11th, over 1.4 million watched as Mr. Trump marched down Fifth Avenue with more than 25,000 veterans, some dressed in their vintage uniforms.
Mr. Trump is the co-producer of the reality television series, “The Apprentice” which quickly became the number one show on television, making ratings history and receiving rave reviews and world-wide attention. “The Celebrity Apprentice” has met with great success as well, being one of the highest rated shows on television. The Apprentice’s record fourteenth season premiered in January, 2015. “You’re fired!” is listed as the third greatest television catchphrase of all time. In 2007, Mr. Trump received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he is among the highest paid public speakers in the world. The Apprentice has raised over $15 million for charity.
Mr. Trump was born in Queens, New York. He is married to Melania Trump and father to Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka, Eric, Tiffany and Barron. He is a proud grandfather of seven.
MIKE PENCE
Mike Pence is a former six-term U.S. congressman from Indiana and current governor of Indiana. In 2016 he was chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee on Donald Trump’s ticket.
Born in Indiana in 1959, Mike Pence attended Hanover College and the Indiana University McKinney School of Law. After losing two bids for a U.S. congressional seat, he became a conservative radio and TV talk show host in the 1990s. Pence successfully ran for Congress in 2000, rising to the powerful position of Republican conference chairman, before being elected governor of Indiana in 2012. In July 2016, he surfaced as the vice presidential running mate for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.Also read: The Ballot Measure One statement you never saw in the Official Election Pamphlet.
The Alaska Division of Elections posted a solicitation to the Alaska Online Public Notice System seeking offers to write an opposing position to Ballot Measure 1, an act allowing for qualified individual to be automatically registered to vote when applying for a Permanent Fund Dividend. The Division received no offers, so they printed the Official Election Pamphlet without an opposing statement.
Here’s a statement that voters might have gotten if the Division of Elections had sincerely endeavored to get the position of the loyal opposition:
I voted, maybe someone else’s ballot.
Ballot Measure 1 would automatically enroll Alaskans as voters when they apply for their Permanent Fund Dividend.
The estimate to maintain the program is more than $1.2 million every four years. Ten temporary state employees will be required. There are other expenses associated with the program, but monetary costs are not the biggest concern.
The Alaska Constitution speaks to Alaskans’ rights and responsibilities: Alaskans have the right to vote, but along with that comes the responsibility to be engaged, informed, and involved enough to take the one step needed to cast a ballot: You must register to vote.
It is not hard to accomplish voter registration. “Motor voter” has improved voter registration access because people can register when they apply for a driver’s license or official state identification. Voter registration is widely accessible in every part of the state; people can register online, by mail, at libraries, or at any government office. There are no barriers that need to be overcome.
But Ballot Measure 1 makes voter registration automatic, fundamentally changing the relationship between Alaskans and their government, requiring no responsibility from people other than to apply for a Permanent Fund dividend.
Further, the voluntary voter registration activity is a cornerstone check-box item for the personnel at the Permanent Fund Division to establish a person’s residency.
By making voter registration universal, it actually removes a key test of a person’s dividend eligibility.
Many individuals do not have rent or utility receipts in their own name, and may not even have a state-issued identification.
An example of this is a military spouse who is a stay-home mom, who may have no other means to establish residency other than voluntarily registering to vote.
People have to take an action, in other words, to establish that they are a resident. Registering to vote is one such action. If registering to vote becomes non-voluntary process, the Division cannot use it any longer to qualify an individual. This will likely require either a change in statute or regulatory changes.
How can we be certain that the Division of Elections, which has already demonstrated it has problems ensuring free and fair elections, will adequately verify voter eligibility? And why is there such a push to automatically register the 70,000 people who evidently have no interest in voting?
The answer is voter fraud. With 100 percent of adult Alaskans registered to vote, we will witness a lot more voter fraud as groups with an agenda will quickly figure out how to vote those ballots that are now going to low-information and lower-propensity voters.
Fraud is a real concern. In 2013, New York state investigators went to 63 polling places and assumed the names of individuals who had died, moved away, or who were in jail. 97 percent of the time those undercover investigators were allowed to vote. In rural Alaska, the most recent primary election has peeled back the problem of widespread double voting, overuse of personal representatives in voting, and even a lack of privacy with voting booths.
Once everyone is automatically registered to vote, the universality of voter rolls means voting will, in time, become an underground commodity market, where ballots are the currency that special interest groups find a way to control.
For another perspective on why you should vote no on Ballot Measure 1, read Paul Jenkins’ column at the Alaska Dispatch News.
Suzanne Downing’s recent piece on AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami’s snarling demeanor set me thinking about this:
Vince showed up at my door back during the primary. He was campaigning for AFL-CIO backed candidates in my district.
Unlike most Republicans, I’m comfortable with union guys, even the ones who hate me, and we had a nice chat. My style was that I always acted like the employer, and I expected them to act like the union. In today’s world not many on either side of the table understand those well-defined roles.
There has been unionization of American labor since the earliest colonial days; most of the skilled trades had guilds or unions and worked under contract to their employers. The unions had no power to compel the employers to employ them or to contract with them, but the mutual necessity of having and providing skilled labor forced the employees and the employers to find a way to reach some mutual accord.
In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act imposed a legal duty on employers to collectively bargain with unions representing a majority of their employees and to enter into written and enforceable contracts with those unions. The dynamic was essentially the Marxist compromise: The collectivized workers had power to confront the collectivized capital of the corporation. Both had their own interests, but they had a shared interest as well, mutual survival. If the employer couldn’t make money, it couldn’t employ the employees. That is the private sector dynamic; there never was much of it, and it didn’t last very long.
ENTER GOVERNMENT
In 1935 about 7 percent of the U.S. workforce was unionized. New Deal public works projects, US re-armament, and World War II war production unionized the US workforce. Fundamentally, if your company was going to do business with the US Government, your company had to be union.
Most US war production was done under what we’d now call project labor agreements. The unions didn’t have to “organize” the employees; they organized the government, which then forced the employers to accept the union.
Only the old skilled trades unions weren’t firmly leftist or even openly communist, and typical of the Left, they overplayed their hand. The backlash was powerful. In 1948, the Democrats lost control of the Congress for the first time since 1932 and the Republican Congress, over five vetoes by President Truman, passed the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the NLRA.
Talking about 1948 will still get a tear in the eyes of an old-time trade unionist and no union guy will ever forgive the Republicans for Taft-Hartley. This is something Republican candidates must understand in dealing with unions; they will NEVER forgive the Republican Party and they will never support a Republican if they have a remotely viable Democrat opponent.
Over the ensuing years, union membership plummeted. Recovering industrial capacity post WWII in the rest of the world and U.S. free-trade policy further eroded the manufacturing labor base of organized labor. Today, the true private sector unionization is about what it was in 1935 when the NLRA was passed: It’s back to 7 percent.
In the halcyon days of the 1930s and 1940s, unionized public employees were inconceivable to both labor leaders and Democrat politicians.
Here in Alaska, traditional organized labor wanted little to do with public employees until the 1980s. Even after the Public Employment Relations Act was passed in 1972, most of the unions chartered public sector-only unions to keep the public employees separate.
Most public employees who unionized were represented by independent employee associations that were basically State-chartered non-profit corporations that called themselves unions.
Enter the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (AFSCME) in the late 1980s. The oil price crash of the mid-80s led the Legislature to refuse to fund the third year of Gov. Bill Sheffield’s 1984-86 agreements with State employee unions, and the war began.
Thus, 3.8 percent will always be emblazoned on my brain: That’s the raise they didn’t get, and even today you can’t talk to a State employee union representative long without the rep bringing up the notion of workers being “owed” 3.8 percent.
The general government bargaining unit (GGU) of State employees, and especially its Juneau chapter, has always been a nest of malcontents and they led the charge to affiliate with a national union. In late 1988, AFSCME, acting as the Alaska State Employees Association, decertified the independent association that had represented the GGU since bargaining began. In one fell swoop that made public employees the largest union in the Alaska AFL-CIO.
The AFL-CIO had heretofore represented the building trades primarily, and the AFL-CIO and the business community in Alaska had enjoyed a relatively peaceful and mutually beneficial relationship.
Public employees range from not caring about development and the business community to positively hating development and the business community. The the entire dynamic of the AFL-CIO’s relations with Alaska’s political system changed on September 17, 1988. You can read my book to learn how that all played out in the 1990s and into the 2000s, but suffice it to say that the dominant force in the most powerful interest group in Alaska, the AFL-CIO, is unionized public employees.
ENTER VINCE BELTRAMI
AFL-CIO Alaska President Vince Beltrami and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
So, now we’re back to Vince Beltrami, the head of the AFL-CIO. Vince’s second in command is Jim Duncan, former legislator and commissioner, and head of the Alaska State Employees Association, the people who contribute the most to Vince’s salary.
Vince is an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers guy. The IBEW represents employees of government-owned or government monopoly utilities and unionized contractors working on publicly funded projects.
This is the Third Sector, the businesses that live off government money and regulation. In the Third Sector, the union and management are usually co-conspirators to get their hands as far in the taxpayer, rate payer, or share-holder pocket as possible.
Vince and people like him have never really had an adversary across the bargaining table. The reason he likes to call Alaska Republican Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock a union buster from his time on the Matanuska Electric Association board is because Babcock wasn’t bought by the union and wasn’t acting as a co-conspirator with the union.
They often called me a union buster too; if I’d actually wanted to bust unions, they’d be busted. Like the spoiled children that they are at heart, they just can’t stand opposition.
When ASEA bought the governorship for Tony Knowles, the State’s labor relations policy became: “Ask ASEA what they want.” Six years in, the Knowles Administration had figured out that they simply couldn’t keep their friends happy and they were sick of ASEA’s guerilla theater and outrageous demands.
They hired me back from the Legislature to try to clean up the mess they’d made.
What I learned from that experience is that the State, with a little prodding, still knew how to be the State. The unions had all but forgotten how to be a union. If they couldn’t just call the commissioner’s office and take care of it, they didn’t know what to do.
I had a great run; won a bazillion arbitrations, fired a whole bunch of loud-mouthed union activists. Then peace broke out all over and I maintained a stately pace towards retirement.
What Vince needs is aggressive opposition; he’s never really had it before.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska. He is the author of the book, Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance, available at Amazon.
By popular demand, here is the letter that Alaska Gov. Bill Walker sent to leaders in the Alaska business community after he received a D grade on the Alaska Business Report Card:
Gov. Bill Walker was feeling tased by the recent Alaska Business Report Card. He brought it up in his remarks to the Alaska State Chamber of Commerce, which was holding its fall meeting in Kenai this week.
The Alaska Business Report Card had given him a “D” grade. It released that grade on Sept. 13. A number of those people who take part in the project were in the audience.
“You need to stop giving us grades,” he said to the business leaders assembled at the Challenger Learning Center, before stopping himself and shifting direction. He said, “Don’t pick on my administration. I am pretty defensive about my team.”
Many on his team come from the private sector, Walker continued. They gave up huge jobs and big paychecks to come and work for his administration. “Attack me,” he said, “just don’t attack my people.”
Two weeks ago the governor sent a letter to the Chamber and other groups participating in the Report Card project, in which he painstakingly defended his administration in a strongly worded rebuke.
“Enclosed is a point-by-point response to your unsigned letter dated September 12, 2016, purporting to assess the performance of my Administration during the past legislative session. Overall, it is difficult to take the grade or analysis seriously, [ital. ours] on account of your shifting criteria and inaccurate and selective use of facts,” Walker wrote.
But Walker did take it seriously. He disputed each and every grade he received and went on for six pages — single spaced — doing so. He sent his rebuttal letter not only to the Alaska Chamber of Commerce, but to the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, the Resource Development Council, and Prosperity Alaska, a group that sponsors the Accountability Project.
Walker’s letter went on to chastise the business community: “Our state is facing an unprecedented fiscal challenge…What have your organizations done to help solve this overarching threat to Alaska’s prosperity?”
Business leaders have repeatedly admonished the governor to bring down government overhead before looking for new revenues.
In his remarks to the Chamber this week, he remarked about how hard it is to govern during times of crises: “I will take all the blame, and if there’s any credit you can take the credit.”
But in his letter to the Chamber and other groups that make up the Alaska Business Report Card, he put the blame squarely on members of the Legislature: “To blame my Administration for the inaction of lawmakers — some of whom publicly admitted that their re-election was a higher priority than fixing the fiscal gap — negligently fails to assign responsibility to where it belongs.”
The governor blamed the Legislature for not passing even one item of his New Sustainable Alaska Plan, a mix of taxes and Permanent Fund restructuring:
“Also not factored into your assessment was our proposal, introduced during the last legislative session as part of the New Sustainable Alaska Plan, to pay these credits off in full. Here again, it was legislative inaction that resulted in the eventual outcome. Without a single piece of our plan passing the Legislature, it would have been irresponsible to pay out the credits beyond the minimum required in statute,” he wrote in his letter of rebuttal to the Report Card partners.
But during the legislative session he had a different tune. He said his entire tax plan had to pass — it was all or nothing. He would not accept just an income tax, a gasoline tax, or higher corporation taxes. He demanded all of the parts, including the restructuring of the Permanent Fund, to be passed at once.
In a May 31 press conference, Walker also bristled about criticism of his administration:
“Those that say we haven’t done enough — I’m pushing back on that. I’m very offended by that. That’s unjustified and it’s an insult — not to me — it’s an insult to my staff. Our directors, our cabinet members, that have given up, you know, a lot of their personal time to travel this great state to do that.”
This week he was equally offended, only he expressed it directly to the Alaska business community.
Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott, left, and Gov. Bill Walker: Looking out for some voters but not others?
THE DIVISION OF NEGLECTIONS IS ‘WITH HER’
Voters in Alaska got a surprise when they opened up their Official Election Pamphlet this week. There was no information about the top of the Republican ticket: Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
There’s also no information on Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson.
Hillary Clinton, the Democrat however, is featured, along with her running mate Tim Kaine. So is Jill Stein of the Green Party, and a handful of other also-rans.
Once criticism started rolling into the Division of Elections, Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott issued a carefully worded statement that includes this paragraph:
“For presidential and vice presidential candidates from a recognized political party, parties submit their Certificate of Nomination. All of the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates were asked to submit materials from the National and State Party Chairperson. However, the Republican and Libertarian candidates did not submit anything for publication in the Official Election Pamphlet by the August 30, 2016 deadline.
Here’s the explanation given by Alaska Republican Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock:
“The Division of Elections never contacted the Trump campaign,” he said, after consulting with both Trump representatives and the Republican National Committee.
Instead, the Division went a circuitous route: “They sent a letter to the RNC about an election matter, and in the fourth paragraph they made a reference to the official election pamphlet. The Division of Elections never actually contacted Trump’s people to see if the information had gotten to the campaign.”
Babcock was copied on the letter to the RNC, but the Alaska Republican Party doesn’t typically contact national candidates about the pamphlet deadlines, he added, and so it wasn’t an action item for the local party.
The Division of Elections is arguing that their idea of notifying the Trump campaign was sufficient, although the results in the pamphlet indicate that only one out of three candidates knew of the deadline.
“No one at the local level knew that the information had not been submitted until the election pamphlet was printed,” said Jerry Ward, Trump’s campaign director for Alaska, who found out about the missing information the same way everyone else did — by opening up the voter pamphlet he received in the mail.
“The Election Division never reached out or even sent the information to Trump Headquarters in New York City. That’s where all questionnaires and materials go. We don’t fill out materials here at the local level. Instead of sending it to the published campaign address, they sent it to the RNC. Who does that?”
The answer may be that a barely competent Election Division, which was defending itself in court against a challenge over the District 40 double-voting scandal, does just that.
Whether intentional or unintentional, the Division’s method for contacting the three major national candidates resulted in a one-in-three success rate.
“People have been calling me this morning concerned that Gov. Mallott is trying to suppress Republican voter turnout. They’re furious, saying that Mallott thinks it’s OK to let people in rural Alaska vote twice, and it’s also OK to publish an election pamphlet with one out of the three major candidates for president represented,” Ward said. “It doesn’t look like the Division made any real effort to reach out to the Republican candidate.”
At the very least, the State of Alaska needs to correct the problem on their web site and with a supplemental mailing, Ward said. “It’s not like they didn’t know where Trump headquarters was in New York City.”
Babcock has asked the Division of Elections to provide him with the exact address they sent the pamphlet information to for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the other campaigns that are represented in the pamphlet, such as Darrell Castle, Constitution Party, and Rocky de la Fuente, a non-affiliated candidate. There has been no response from the Division, he said.
Voters curious about the Trump campaign can go to his web site, where a contact number is clearly posted on the front page.
BALLOT MEASURE INFORMATION MISSING
Ballot Measure One, which will make voter registration automatic for anyone applying for their Permanent Fund Dividend, provided a statement in favor of the measure, but no opposing statement.
“After posting to the Alaska Online Public Notice System and solicitations, the Division of Elections did not receive a response for the Statement in Opposition for this ballot measure.”
WHAT WALKER DIDN’T SAY WAS NOT LOST ON BUSINESS LEADERS
Gov. Bill Walker’s speech to the Alaska Chamber of Commerce’s Fall Forum on Wednesday came during a crucial time in his administration’s budget cycle.
Department budgets are now nearly finalized and are ready to be hammered into the budget system. Within two weeks, they’ll be 99 percent done, if this administration is anything like others.
The governor by now knows what his budget is going to generally look like going into the next fiscal year. He will be presenting the budget to the Alaska Legislature the first week of December.
But Walker didn’t mention any budget particulars to the State Chamber, a group that has consistently told him to cut agency budgets first before pursuing new revenues. What he said was, in essence, “I’m going to need some more money.”
Walker said he will present a similar package of taxes during the upcoming legislative session, only now those taxes will be higher.
“Some will be higher than last year,” he said. “If we don’t do something this year, it will be more difficult in subsequent years.”
The taxes he will propose may very well include an increase in corporation taxes, according to those close to the administration.
“We have to have some stability, take the volatility out of our income so the Legislature doesn’t have to worry about huge rises and large falls,” he said, describing the pitfalls of being an oil-dependent economy.
“I want to make sure no future governor ever has to make the kinds of decisions I have to make,” Walker said.
Later during the fall meeting, former state budget director Cheryl Frasca said that actual cuts to agency operations during the last budget cycle were under 10 percent.
She said the 44 percent number that Commissioner of Revenue Randall Hoffbeck was touting as cuts included all cuts going back to 2013.
Today the Alaska Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling and awarded the House District 40 win to challenger Dean Westlake. Both Westlake and Rep. Ben Nageak are Democrats. The winner of the Aug. 16 primary is the presumed winner of the General Election on Nov. 8, as there are no Republicans or other candidates on the ballot.
The court decided that the double voting in Shungnak, resulting in 100 ballots cast, was merely an election worker error, not election malconduct, and that in Kivalina it was voter error. But the decision was not explained by the court.
The 50 voters who cast ballots in Shungnak were told to vote two ballots, rather than one.
The decision was published by the Court, but the thinking behind the decision was not given.
DONALD J. TRUMP
DONALD J. TRUMP
Mike Pence is a former six-term U.S. congressman from Indiana and current governor of Indiana. In 2016 he was chosen as the Republican vice presidential nominee on Donald Trump’s ticket.
