The District 10 — south Anchorage district Republicans — endorsed Nick Begich for Congress on Tuesday evening.
Now, 13 Republican districts are endorsing Begich, and not a single district has endorsed Nancy Dahlstrom. There are more endorsements for Begich to come, Must Read Alaska has learned.
Districts that have announced their endorsement for Begich now include 1, 6, 8, 10, 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, and 36.
There are 36 organized districts in the state, so District 10’s endorsement brings the percentage going on record for Nick Begich to 36% of those organized districts.
Also, six of seven Alaska Republican women’s clubs and both of the Young Republican clubs endorse Begich. Rep. Byron Donalds, inside Donald Trump’s inner circle, also endorses Begich.
Dahlstrom, who has physically disappeared from the Alaska race in recent days, is said to be raising money in Wyoming. Her campaign is being mainly run by D.C. political action committees.
District 10 also decided to endorse Rep. Craig Johnson for reelection, and refused to endorse his false-flag Republican opponent Chuck Kopp.
The latest Division of Elections reports shows that 6,594 Alaskans have voted — 4,324 of those are early voters and the remaining 2,270 are absentee ballots received by the Division of Elections, so far.
The primary ends at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, Aug. 20. Learn how to vote absentee or vote early at this link.
When governments across the country enacted face mask mandates during the Covid scare of 2020 and 2021, they created a new normal. Criminals pounced on it. Now, rioters, ancharchists, and criminals routinely wear face masks while committing crimes in cities and towns.
New York’s Nassau County has had enough. Today, lawmakers in the county, a suburb of New York City, approved a bill banning masks in public places. The county leaders made it a misdemeanor offense.
The bill was introduced in response to antisemitic acts perpetrated by those wearing masks, mostly pro-Hamas rioters.
“This legislature [the local government] finds that masks and facial coverings that are not worn for health and safety concerns or for religious or celebratory purposes are often used as a predicate to harassing, menacing or criminal behavior,” the bill says. It allows local law enforcement officers the authority to demand that people remove their masks during a traffic stop or “when the officer has reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and/or intention to partake in criminal activity.”
There is an exemption for those who wear face coverings for religious or health reasons.
The measure passed with 12 Republicans voting for it, and 7 Democrats voting against it.
The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the measure.
“Nassau County’s mask ban is a dangerous misuse of the law to score political points and target protestors,” the regional director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Making anonymous protest illegal chills political action and is ripe for selective enforcement, leading to doxxing, surveillance and retaliation against protesters.”
A mask should not be a get-out-of-jail card, proponents said. Criminals have taken advantage of the normalization of masks, and now citizens are becoming fearful of those who wear them because mask-wearing is becoming synonymous with criminal activity.
BREAKING: Nassau County, NY passes bill BANNING face masks in public
Anchorage Municipal Clerk Jamie Heinz has issued a warning that there’s an email scam that is impersonating her office that is making the rounds.
The email is targeting applicants for marijuana and alcohol licenses and is separately targeting people asking for appearances before the regular Assembly meetings.
Some applicants who requested to appear before the Assembly received a scam email inviting the recipient to pay an additional fee to “invite your favorite politician” to the meeting and air the segment on “a major television network as part of a public education initiative.”
The Municipal Clerk’s Office does not request payment from applicants for additional add-ons to public meeting appearances, Heinz noted. The office didn’t indicate how the scammers got ahold of the email addresses of the people requesting appearances.
Some license applicants received a scam email announcing a “newly introduced municipal compensation fee.” The scam asserts applicants must pay the new fee to “cover several aspects” of the application process, including “infrastructural provision” to pay for public utilities and road maintenance, described as “essential for your customers’ convenience.” The scam claims that paying the fee helps “qualify your business for any future grants.”
The Municipal Clerk’s Office does not administer grants and does not pay into general government operations.
In both instances, the scam misidentifies the Municipal Clerk as former Clerk Barbara Jones, Heinz said. Jones left the municipality and went to work on the campaign of now-Mayor Suzanne LaFrance.
The scam was sent from an email ending in @usa.com. The Municipal Clerk’s Office only communicates using official @muni.org and @anchorageak.gov email addresses.
If you receive an email like this, please call the Municipal Clerk’s Office at 907-343-4311 or forward the email to [email protected] to report the scam.
Kamala Harris showed her cards on Tuesday. She went hard in the paint against Elon Musk, the self-made U.S. citizen who bought the X/Twitter platform in 2022 in order to save America’s promise of free speech from social media tyrants.
Musk is a businessman who started from scratch and also built the most famous electric vehicle company in the world, launched a satellite network that serves rural areas of Alaska, and is a pioneer in space with Space X, the privately run rocket launching company.
He is, by all measures, an extraordinary entrepreneur. He had a role in the founding of The Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink and OpenAI. As one of the wealthiest people in the world, his net worth is estimated to be $241 billion.
But if Harris wins, it’s clear she is going to exact her revenge on him. She’s calling a private businessman names.
“The richest person in the world is a lackey for Team MAGA,” she wrote, after Musk used the X platform to interview Donald Trump — an interview that was seen by more than 1 billion people.
Musk has offered the same interview opportunity to Harris, but it’s doubtful she will accept after calling him a lackey and saying he “ruined Twitter,” which Musk reorganized in order to stop censorship. Before Musk, Twitter was found to have coordinated with the federal government to suppress news stories and cancel accounts that reported on stories relating to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton.
“Democrat rule precedes business doom! Harris and Biden’s braying about ‘corporate greed’ is just to mask their economic failures. They attack job-creators while families struggle, forced to choose between groceries or gas,” sad Kelly Tshibaka, Alaska state director for the Trump/Vance campaign.
Harris has tried to characterized her campaign as one of “joy,” and critics have said Trump does too much name-calling. But Musk, who was the darling of the Democrats, has now put a target on himself should Harris get elected.
The legacy media did the heaviest lifting for Kamala Harris, however, after the Trump discussion with Musk. The X account called @autismcapital compiled a page of mainstream media reaction to the interview:
A legend in Alaska talk radio is coming back to the airwaves in Alaska after taking 18 months off. Dan Fagan says retirement is not all it’s cracked up to be.
“It’s been 18 months since I walked away from the microphone – believing at the time – I was done for good. But how much golf can one man really play? On Monday, I’m jumping back into the battle, ready to fight, fight, fight, as our next president has called us to do. My show will air between 7 & 9 AM on KVNT 92.5 FM in Eagle River, 104.5 FM in Anchorage and 1020 AM in the Mat-Su Valley and streamed globally on 1020KVNT.com.“
Fagan was also a popular columnist here at Must Read Alaska until his retirement. Hopefully he’ll get back on his keyboard and contribute in this space, as well as over the airwaves. Fagan moved to New Orleans a several years ago to take care of his aging mother. His show, which ended in December of 2022, ran five days a week for four years. Prior to that, he had a long history in journalism and pioneered conservative blogging in Alaska with the Alaska Standard, which he stopped publishing years ago. He’s also written opinion columns for the NOLA.com news site for New Orleans.
Alaska House District 6 and 29 Republicans, located in conservative Lower Kenai and in Wasilla-Sutton, have joined two other Republican district committees in passing resolutions stating that after the primary election on Aug. 20, only the top vote-winning Republican candidate for Congress should proceed to the November ballot. Second, third, and fourth place Republicans should drop by Sept. 2.
Candidate Nick Begich, who has been through a tough ranked-choice voting process in 2022, is the only Republican who has made that commitment so far. Nancy Dahlstrom has refused to say if she will drop if she loses to Begich.
District 13 and District 25 Republicans have passed resolutions that ask candidates to “drop, if not on top.” All four districts are among the dozen that have endorsed Nick Begich.
The resolutions from District 29 and District 6 say, in part, that many Alaskans refuse to take part in ranked-choice voting, and only want to vote for one candidate. Having more than one Republican candidate on the ballot in the November general election “has the potential to dilute the vote and forfeit the election to a candidate other than a Republican.
The resolutions state, “at lease one Republican candidate has publicly declared his willingness to withdraw from the race if he is not the Republican who garners the most votes in the Primary Election.” That’s Nick Begich.
The districts are directly speaking to the other three Republicans, including Dahlstrom.
Districts that have announced their endorsement for Begich now include 1, 6, 8, 17, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 34, and 36.
Also, six of seven Alaska Republican women’s clubs and both of the Young Republican clubs endorsed Begich.
The Alaska primary elections used to allow Republicans to hold their own primary with a ballot open to Republicans and anyone else not signed up with an official party. But in 2020, Ballot Measure 2, backed by dark money from the New Venture Fund, passed the voters. This took away the Republican primary and created a system by which all candidates are on the same ballot.
There are 12 candidates competing for Congress and the top four will proceed to the general election, where voters are then instructed to rank them in the order of their preference. Through a tabulation system that depends on machines, the lowest voted candidate gets tossed and his ballot is awarded to whomever was the voters’ second choice.
The process of reassigning ballots in this way means that those who only vote for one candidate might have their ballot counted only once, if their candidate is not the winner, while people who rank may have their ballots counted as many as three times until their ballot joins the others for the winning candidate.
Many Republicans oppose this system and a great number refuse to participate in ranking, preferring to state their one choice and then cast their ballot.
Tim Walz, Democrat vice presidential candidate, has been found to have embellished his military service, including saying he served at a higher rank than he actually did. Will this hurt him with voters in the general election?
This poll is closed. After 20 hours, the results are:
396 people said it will hut him and 82 people said it will not hurt him.
Thanks for taking part. We’ll do another one soon!
(Editor’s note: Art Chance wrote opinion, theater reviews, and political analysis for Must Read Alaska for many years. He passed peacefully in his sleep on Oct. 17, 2023. This column first ran on Nov. 10, 2021 and we run it again in his memory.)
I spent an interesting hour or so last week with Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer. I wouldn’t say we’re friends; I was in government too long to really have friends, but we know each other and can converse as honestly as political types converse.
I’m associated with a group of old guys, mostly guys, mostly old anyway, who have a few hundred years of governmental and political experience. And while we’re mostly out to pasture, we still like to meddle in things and tell people what they should have done.
So, we had a chat with the lieutenant governor about election integrity, mail ballots, witness signatures, Dominion machines, and most interestingly, the Kelly Tshibaka report on the Division of Elections.
In the early days of the Dunleavy Administration, Tshibaka was something of a minister without portfolio who had a fancy pedigree and a resume as an Inspector General for the U.S. Government. Gov. Mike Dunleavy tasked her with doing an investigative report on the Division of Elections. I’ll assume it was for “the Administration,” but I’ve worked in administrations where the governor and the lieutenant governor weren’t all that friendly, so I don’t know whose idea it was and what the real purpose was.
Tshibaka produced an investigative report, which since she was working for him, I assume she gave to the governor. It appears the governor gave it to the lieutenant governor, who has responsibility for the Division of Elections. Somewhere in there, the Attorney General got involved.
It was supposed to be a meeting of allies if not friends, so I couldn’t subject Lt. Gov. Meyer to the withering cross-examination my old advocate’s brain was screaming for. Meyer is a former senator, so I assure you he knew little of the ways of the Executive Branch. Most of Gov. Dunleavy’s appointees had little or no Executive Branch experiences so I don’t know how they looked at things.
In my time as an appointed official, I was a jaded, cynical, long-time bureaucrat who would never involve the Attorney General in any of my business unless I wanted to delay or hide something or knew it was destined to go to court, and even then, I’d wait as long as I dared.
Rule One: If you’re a Republican-elected or -appointed official, the Department of Law is not your friend.
Since I couldn’t do that cross-examination, I don’t know if Meyer went to Attorney General Treg Taylor for advice or word leaked out that there was some sort of report . Somebody filed a Public Records Act request for the report. Alaska’s Public Records Act dates back to the days when so-called “Sunshine Laws” were very fashionable and it is pretty wide open. Other than a very limited number of explicit protections, if the State produces it or causes it to be produced, it is a public record and the public is entitled to inspect the record. If you want copies, they can charge for the copies, but that is a clue they don’t like you and aren’t going to be helpful. In any event, the Tshibaka report wound up in the care of the AG and has never seen the light of day since.
Gov. Sarah Palin and Annette Kreitzer, her Commissioner of Administration, struggled mightily with this issue, but the struggle is futile; if you don’t want to read it on the front page of the newspaper that hates you most, don’t do it, don’t write it, or record it. I was a pretty controversial figure for many years; try finding something that isn’t a pleading or a published formal document on State letterhead with my name on it.
Sen. Mike Shower is trying to advance some election integrity legislation. Of course, there are a lot of people in the State Legislature whose last desire is election integrity, especially those whose day job is with a union. Shower is a sitting Senator and he says the lieutenant governor and the AG won’t give him a state document. There is absolutely no legal reason under the Public Records Act to deny release of that report to any citizen of Alaska, and especially not to a member of the Legislature. (A caveat; I’m given to understand that it has some reference to the criminal case against Rep. Gabriel LeDoux, and there is an explicit confidentiality protection for information related to an on-going criminal matter.)
I’ve dealt with some of these requests from legislators when I believed that it was all about a State employee trying to use political influence. I just sent the requesting legislator a copy of AS 39.25.080, the law controlling State employee record confidentiality and asked them if they would adhere to it if we provided the record. If they agreed, it was a crime to give the record to their favorite ADN reporter, so we never had any real problem with it.
So, we got a concert of mumbling and dissembling from Meyer. He carried on about how it wasn’t finished. All he needs to do is read AS 40.25.220 and he’ll find that drafts and notes are public records. If you produce it as a State employee or officer, it is a public record and the only way you can avoid disclosing it is to throw it in Gastineau Channel; you’ll get charged with destroying the public record. You be the judge of which is best for your career.
I don’t even know what is in the Tshibaka report; it may say that the Alaska Division of Elections is the best in the world. But if it does, why are they hiding it? In my days as an advocate, I had a simple rule; if it was there to come out in hearing, it was going to come out, so it was a helluva lot better for it to come out from you than from the adversary. Meyer and Dunleavy need to stop hiding behind or listening to the lawyers and just stand up with this. Wondering what it says is worse than knowing what it says.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
The same dark money group that is now funding a voter initiative on campaign contributions, so the dark money Outside groups can continue to control elections in Alaska, is responsible for making Alaska’s elections insecure back in 2016 through a voter initiative that has, since 2017, registered people to vote automatically whenever they apply for a Permanent Fund dividend. Even if they aren’t citizens.
New Venture Fund put at least $565,000 into the effort in 2016 that succeeded in convincing Alaskans to pass a ballot measure that allows anyone who even applies for a Permanent Fund dividend to get a voter identification card. They should return it if they are not a U.S. citizen, but it’s all on the honor system, according to the Division of Elections.
The New Venture Fund, a subset of the dark-money Arabella Advisors umbrella of political operations, now wants Alaskans to sign a petition saying that individuals can’t contribute more than $2,000 to campaigns, which leaves the dark money groups like the New Venture Fund in control of Alaska elections in perpetuity, because groups like NVF can set up any number of subgroups to funnel money in ways average Alaskans can’t.
With just these two programs — no voter registration controls and preventing people from contributing to campaigns, Alaska will be at the mercy of Outside dark money.
In response to Must Read Alaska‘s story over the weekend, functionaries of the Governor’s Office have told Alaskans that there is nothing that can be done to fix the automatic voter registration problem and that it’s not really a problem. The Must Read Alaska report, they say, is a nothing-burger.
But there is at least one fix. The executive branch could work with the legislature to repeal or amend the Permanent Fund Dividend Automatic Voter Registration Program. The executive branch — the governor and lieutenant governor — could call for a pause in the program while a legal review is done to see if it violates the Alaska Constitution or state statutes.
The seriousness of the problem is hardly in question. The New Venture Fund already finances the 907 Initiative, The Alaska Center for the Environment, the Alaska Venture Fund, and even Alaskans for Posterity, a group that tries to trick people into thinking it is the free-market group known as Americans for Prosperity-Alaska.
The New Venture Fund is the equivalent of a political party in Alaska. It has far more money and influence in elections than the political parties combined.
A Dunleavy Administration employee privately contacted Must Read Alaska subsequent to our story on the flaws in automatic voter registration, and said that the PFD automatic voter registration program is highlighted in the Elections security audit produced by Kelly Tshibaka, former commissioner of Administration, with recommended solutions.
That state’s election security report, completed in 2019, has never been made public and those who have asked for it, including legislators, have had their requests refused. What else is in this report that the public cannot see?
