An Anchorage judge has approved legality of a negotiated commercial agreement between ConocoPhillips and Santos, which is developing the Pikka Project on the North Slope on the west side of the Kuparuk field.
Alaska Superior Court Judge Andrew Guidi said the commercial agreement that ConocoPhillips seeks with Santos to use the KRU (Kuparuk River) Roads follows a long-standing precedent and is a customary practice on the North Slope. ConocoPhillips wants Santos to help out with maintenance costs and is trying to negotiate the fee.
ConocoPhillips has allowed Santos to use the industrial road at no cost since 2018, but now construction of Pikka is under way, and ConocoPhillips wants a contract.
It was the state Department of Natural Resources that said Santos could use the road that ConocoPhillips paid for. The state fought ConocoPhillips in court and won in a lower court. That lower-court decision is now reversed, the judge said.
“DNR [Department of Natural Resources] has no legal basis or authority to grant a third party the right to use CPAI’s [ConocoPhillips] leasehold improvements, by Permit or any other means, even though they are built on state land,” the judge rules.
“Granting [Santos] the right to use CPAI’s leasehold improvements also constitutes an impermissible taking under the U.S. and Alaska Constitutions. For both independent reasons, this Court reverses the Commissioner’s December 1, 2022 Decision and vacates the Permit issued by the March 29, 2022 Director’s Decision, effective immediately.”
Although the road was build decades ago, it requires constant maintenance at a cost of $10-20 million per year. To build such a road today would cost in excess of $1 billion, Guidi acknowledged.
The state, although it owns the land, granted the permit for construction of Kuparuk roads to ConocoPhillips and thus cannot simply allow other oil explorers to use that road system for free, Guidi ruled.
Once developed, the Pikka Project, may add 200,000 barrels of oil to s to the 500,000 barrels now flowing down the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, something that will help the State of Alaska’s budget shortfalls.
Whether the State of Alaska will appeal Guidi’s decision is unknown,
Update: The state has just sent out a press release saying it will appeal the ruling. The commissioner of the Department of Natural Resources, John Boyle, came to his position directly from a job with Santos, which may complicate the matter for him and Gov Mike Dunleavy.
The Hill newspaper, which specializes in political reporting from the nation’s capital, has named Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski a “change maker” for 2024, primarily because she bucks her Republican colleagues.
In the profile of Murkowski, the newspaper engaged in truth-stretching, errors of omission, and outright lies. It’s textbook case fake news.
Here’s the most egregious part of the story:
“She is also the highest-profile proponent of ranked-choice voting in the Senate, something she defended in Alaska this fall when dark-money groups poured more than $12 million dollars into a campaign to get rid of it,” The Hill falsely reported.
In fact, the group trying to get rid of ranked-choice voting raised only about $100,000, almost all of it from inside the state in small-dollar amounts.
It was $15 million in Outside dark money that poured into Alaska to preserve ranked-choice voting, which is the voting system, along with jungle primaries, that was designed by Murkowski supporters to keep Murkowski in office. She no longer has to face a Republican primary, but she can still claim to be a Republican when she gets to the Senate. The group used some of that money to produce ad in which Murkowski lauded ranked-choice voting.
The Hill, Dec. 17, 2024
Here’s what else The Hill wrote:
“She was also a pivotal vote in some of the biggest battles of President-elect Trump’s first term: voting against a proposal to repeal much of the Affordable Care Act and coming out against Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court amid sexual assault allegations.”
The story neglected to mention that Murkowski voted in 2021 to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial — a trial that took place after he was no longer in office.
Now that Sen. Joe Manchin is retiring, “She will be a senator to watch closely as Republicans tussle over the size of Trump’s next tax cut and how much to reduce federal spending to offset its impact on the federal deficit,” The Hill wrote.
“A champion of bipartisanship and pragmatism, Murkowski will be likely involved in any bipartisan deals that emerge in the Senate during Trump’s term,” the newspaper wrote, avoiding mention that she endorsed Democrat Rep. Mary Peltola over a Republican not once, but twice over the course of two elections, and she refused to say who she was voting for for president in 2024, but said she would not vote for Trump.
With a body count of 14 deaths of pedestrians in the roadways of Anchorage this year alone, the Anchorage Assembly is being asked by Mayor Suzanne LaFrance and Assemblyman Randy Sulte to reverse its walk-anywhere approach and reinstate an ordinance pertaining to jaywalking, which has become a nightmare for drivers and deadly for those who wander into the roadways.
In August of 2023, the Anchorage Assembly passed an ordinance prompted by Assembly Daniel Volland, which made jaywalking a legal option in most places.
As the law stands now, it is up to the pedestrian to decide when and where it is safe to cross a street. Drivers say that people in Anchorage now wander in front of their cars all over the city, and they report many close calls on social media. 14 pedestrian deaths (and another in a parking lot) and even more injuries in 2024 — surpasses the entire state record for one year. That prompted LaFrance and Sulte to on Tuesday file the proposed reinstatement of fines for those crossing outside of marked crosswalks.
“The prohibition of pedestrians crossing the roadway outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk sets a community and legal expectation that everyone, drivers and pedestrians alike, must take personal responsibility for their safety on the roads,” the ordinance says.
The 2023 ordinance was passed without consulting Anchorage police, who disagreed with the approach that “anything goes” in roadways would result in a better quality of life in Anchorage. In reality, police rarely enforced a jaywalking ticket-able offense, but the law encouraged people to use crosswalks.
Yet the woke majority of the Assembly decided that Anchorage jaywalking laws were racist and must go. Even this new ordinance echoes that belief system, saying “Municipality acknowledges that enforcement of pedestrian behavior laws can result in a disproportionate impact on people of color and unhoused individuals.” By impact, they apparently mean getting run over when people are stumbling into traffic.
The new ordinance says that a “preliminary review” suggests 11 of the pedestrian deaths occurred on a major roadway and outside of a marked or unmarked crosswalk, with the other three occurring within an unmarked crosswalk.
“Pedestrian safety is connected to individual and societal expectations and behaviors, deterrents, infrastructure improvements, and public education,” the new ordinance says. “Pedestrian safety is a complex issue, and with many different tactics to increase safety being simultaneously implemented through Vision Zero, using data to determine the efficacy of a single tactic can be difficult.”
The proposed ordinance requires police to track encounters and citations related to pedestrian contacts, injuries, and deaths, and any other relevant data to help inform the Assembly about the efficacy of jaywalking laws and to report back to the Assembly in 2026.
The ordinance was introduced Tuesday and will go through the public comment process before being voted on at a later time, possibly after a few more “Assembly equity deaths” occur on the streets of Anchorage.
The Assembly in September also considered adding back lighting to streets to improve visibility, without acknowledging that most of the pedestrian deaths are occurring during daylight hours, many of them in summer. The Assembly also considered but ultimately decided against a special driving law for a section of downtown Anchorage that prohibited a right turn on a red light.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan called former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard a friend, and said today she has what it takes to be an effective director of National Intelligence. The position is the leader of the country’s intelligence community, overseeing and directing the implementation of the National Intelligence Program budget and serving as the principal advisor to the president, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to national security.
“It was good meeting with my friend @TulsiGabbard today. During our discussions, which focused on issues across the globe that impact national security, including Alaska and the Arctic, Lt. Col. Gabbard demonstrated a deep understanding of the responsibilities of the DNI. She will be an important and strong member of the Trump Administration as they restore “Peace Through Strength,” Sullivan wrote on X/Twitter.
Sullivan has taken the lead role in the Alaska delegation when it comes to meeting with Donald Trump’s nominees in advance of Senate confirmation votes in January. He met with Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary, and Rep. Elise Stefanik, nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, and spoke highly of both of them.
Gabbard is a former Democrat who recently abandoned the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans, endorsing Trump and joining the Make America Great Again movement.
Born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, Gabbard was raised in Hawaii, where at 21-years-old she was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives. She served one term and then left when she was deployed to Iraq with her National Guard unit.
She was later elected to Congress as the first Hindu member of the House, and the first American Samoan elected to Congress.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been tight-lipped on her opinion about Hegseth and has not announced a meeting with Gabbard yet. Both have been targets of the Left and the legacy media that speaks for the Left.
But Murkowski had good things to say about two other nominees — Interior Secretary nominee Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary nominee Chris Wright.
“Both have spent considerable time in Alaska and will be great partners who recognize energy as a good thing and a national asset,” she said.
President Donald Trump has sued famous pollster J. Ann Selzer, her firm Selzer & Company, The Des Moines Register, and its parent company Gannett for violating Iowa’s consumer fraud laws after it published arguably fake data two days before the 2024 general election. Trump is alleging it wasn’t an unintentional mistake that led to the warped results being broadcast to the key election state of Iowa.
Selzer, using unknown methods to support her claim, predicted that Kamala Harris had the lead in Iowa. Trump says that pushing that narrative, Selzer was trying to help Democrats win the state.
The poll, released Nov. 2, said Harris was winning by 3 points — 47% to Trump’s 44%.
In fact, Trump won Iowa by nearly a landslide of 56%, a full 14 point difference. There is, at least, an appearance that both the newspaper and its pollster were colluding.
“In my opinion, it was fraud, and it was election interference,” Trump said.
“The [Kamala] Harris Poll was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election,” the court filing says. Read it at this link.
After her disastrous embarrassment in Iowa, Selzer said she will no longer do election polling, but will move on to “other opportunities.”
Nearly all election polls overstate the strength of liberal/progressive candidates and only a handful of pollsters are considered nonpartisan. Reliable pollsters are hard to come by; in Alaska, Dittman Research is considered the most credible. On the national level, Rasmussen Reports, which is conservative, has an acknowledged built-in bias but ends up with fairly credible results.
Earlier this month, Trump agreed to a settlement with ABC News after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on television that Trump had been found guilty of rape. He was not found guilty of rape, but of defamation and sexual abuse of his accuser. ABC has agreed to pay Trump $15 million, earmarked for his presidential library.
Will Trump now go after all the columnists and social influencers who called him a Nazi or fascist during the campaign? If so, he’ll have many Democrats and socialists to litigate against.
At one time in America, falsely calling someone a Nazi was de facto libel or slander, but the phrase is being tossed around liberally these days by many liberals and social media account-holders.
Here are a few examples of news organizations that used the terms Trump, Hitler, Nazi, and fascist in headlines and made the implication that Trump fit the description. These organizations may be able to away with it because of how they carefully couched their terms:
FiveThirtyEight, a polling news reporting company owned by ABC, wrote that the Trump lawsuit is disturbing.
“This would obviously be a baseless lawsuit, but just saying this has a chilling effect, and most pollsters don’t have the financial resources for a legal battle,” wrote Nathaniel Rakich, senior editor at FiveThirtyEight, on X/Twitter.
Former Congresswoman Liz Cheney colluded with at least one witness during the Jan. 6 Select Committee investigation that she oversaw before she was removed by Wyoming voters from office in 2022.
Cheney should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for possible criminal activity, the Committee on House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight report concludes.
“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, the former Vice Chair of the January 6 Select Committee, and these violations should be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the subcommittee report says. “Evidence uncovered by the Subcommittee revealed that former Congresswoman Liz Cheney tampered with at least one witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without Hutchinson’s attorney’s knowledge. This secret communication with a witness is improper and likely violates 18 U.S.C. 1512. Such action is outside the due functioning of the legislative process and therefore not protected by the Speech and Debate clause.”
The report, at this link, calls for the FBI to investigate, as federal law prohibits any person from procuring another person to commit perjury.
“Based on the evidence obtained by this Subcommittee, Hutchinson committed perjury when she lied under oath to the Select Committee. Additionally, Hutchinson was interviewed by the FBI as part of its investigation into President Trump. This Subcommittee sought a copy of the FBI report 302, documenting this interview and Hutchinson’s statements, but the FBI has refused to produce this vital document. The FBI must immediately review the testimony given by Hutchinson in this interview to determine if she also lied in her FBI interview, and, if so, the role former Representative Cheney played in instigating Hutchinson to radically change her testimony,” the report says.
All of this may be moot, as President Joe Biden is providing cover for thousands of criminals and may pardon Cheney before he leaves office. Sen. Bernie Sanders has called for preemptive pardons for Jan. 6 committee members and reports have confirmed that Biden is considering pardons.
An investigation by the FBI may be fraught, since the agency has recently admitted that it had one two dozen agency assets on the ground and in the crowd when the Jan. 6, 2021 protest got out of control and some protesters entered the Capitol, while others become violent outside, fighting with Capitol Police.
In the 1930’s France built the Maginot Line, an array of defenses along the German border to prevent invasion. The Germans, you’ll remember from history class, simply went around it through the Belgian wilderness. The French had a blindspot – the previously impenetrable terrain of their northern neighbour.
80-some years later, America may have a similar exposed flank to the north: Canada’s Arctic.
However secure Americans feel in their well attested military superiority, trouble could be coming over the ‘top’ of the world. As global tensions rise – as a future conflict between the Russia-China axis and Western democracies seems ever more likely – Americans have every right to be frustrated with Canada’s failure to properly equip military personnel in the north and enhance continental security in a serious way.
Arecent audit of Canada’s Department of National defense revealed just how threadbare Canada’s Arctic defense infrastructure has become. One investigative journalism website, blacklocks.ca, summarized the audit in stark terms: “Canada’s military is unprepared to defend the Arctic with few soldiers on deployment, few airfields fit for use by the Air Force and little winter training of combat forces.”
Canada only has 308 regular forces and 2,021 reservists in the North – leaving a third of Canada’s Joint Task Force North unstaffed. Thirty-eight percent of military buildings are more than 50 years old. The military’s equipment is either non-existent or unfit for service such that a majority of expenditure’s for Arctic defense is spent on airlifts and equipment rentals from private contractors. And, as blacklocks.ca also points out, a majority of training exercises are done in the warmer months of the year, rendering their value questionable.
All this adds up to what Canadian military historian J.L. Granatstein wroterecently, “Canada, for all practical purposes, is undefended.”
Neither Canadian nor American politicians are unaware of this. On December 6, Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, released a newArctic Foreign Policy which, to the government’s credit, includes a section on strategic challenges and evolving security threats to the Arctic. The Arctic Foreign Policy claims: “The safety, security and defence of the Canadian Arctic comprise a fundamental priority for the Government of Canada and are critical to the collective defence of North America.” But, if that is the case, why is the military so under-resourced and under-staffed? The gap between the government’s verbiage and the progress towards equipping and modernizing the armed forces is palpable.
Earlier this year Canada also released a defense policy update, Our North Strong and Free, which was rightly focused on the Arctic, but, as defense expert Richard Shimooka explained: “From its production to the presentation of the details contained within, the government often seemed more interested in how it was perceived by the various constituencies it sought to impress.” In other words, the document was posturing for Americans more than a serious effort to fix the Canadian military’s deep set procurement and personnel woes.
What Canada’s needs isn’t posturing for friends, but, as professor Rob Huebert calls for, a serious effort to convince Canada’s “enemies that they cannot successfully attack the United States through our Arctic region.”
To paraphrase professor of Arctic studies Whitney Lackenbauer, the concern is regarding threats through the Arctic, not to the Arctic. The Canadian Arctic is an impractical place for a large-scale ground invasion, and there are no strategic goals accomplished by landing an army on Ellesmere Island or Tuktoyaktuk.
But the Canadian Arctic is an exposed flank of North America – an obvious path for cruise and hypersonic missiles to pass through on the way to targets in the United States. For this reason the Arctic has been a military theatre since the advent of nuclear weapons and the beginning of the Cold War. Sensors were placed along the DEW (Distance Early Warning) Line and the Mid-Canada Line to detect missiles with enough lead time that they could be intercepted before reaching their intended destinations. This later evolved into what we have today, the North Warning System.
Sadly, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the peaceful decades (at least for the West) that followed, Canada allowed the capabilities of the NWS and its contributions to the defense of North America through the North American Aerospace defense Command (NORAD) to diminish. We are now vulnerable to new weapons systems being developed by our adversaries that can evade our outdated defenses.
With the recent belligerence of Russia and the ascendance of China, renewed effort is required to create Fortress North America: a continent with such exquisite defense systems as to be impenetrable in the case of attack, thus deterring such an attack in the first place.
Arctic security is not about insulating the Arctic from shipping traffic, preventing a race for resources, or maintaining sovereignty over specific lands and waters. It is about protecting a vulnerable flank of North America from Chinese and Russian nuclear missiles. The United States has its hands full neutralizing threats on the Atlantic and Pacific sides. If Canada could just defend its own Arctic through increased military investment and better detection and interception capabilities, the United States could concentrate resources in other hot spots.
President-elect Donald Trump, fixated as he is on ensuring NATO allies do their part, will no doubt push Canada to rise to the challenge of Arctic security. Trump, however brash his diplomatic methods may appear, would do all North Americans a favour by forcing Canada to take its national defense commitments seriously.
Daniel Dorman is the managing editor and director of operations at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and the Center for North American Prosperity and Security in Washington, D.C.
In recent weeks, a series of formation and swarm drone sightings over New Jersey, New York, and other parts of the country has prompted concern, with thousands of calls flooding law enforcement switchboards to report the incidents.
Among the areas affected are key military installations: Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which was shut down for hours over the weekend due to drones buzzing the area.
President Donald Trump said that due to the drones flying over the Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort he owns, he has changed his travel plans and will not be going to Bedminster.
“Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don’t want to tell the people, and they should,” said the incoming president.
The federal government’s official position started out with, “Don’t worry, this stuff happens all the time.”
Officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Department of Defense addressed questions about the situation Monday, with an unidentified spokesperson from the Joint Staff confirming the sightings but advising that such occurrences are not unusual. The unidentified spokesman’s statements were posted one the Department of Defense website.
“We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle,” the spokesperson said. “This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”
According to the statement, personnel at these facilities are trained to identify, categorize, and employ tools designed to deter drones from violating restricted airspace.
Officials acknowledged that the origins of the drones remain unknown. The FBI, DHS, FAA, and DOD have yet to identify the operators or their motives.
“To date, we have no intelligence or observations that would indicate that they were aligned with a foreign actor or that they had malicious intent,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “But … we don’t know. We have not been able to locate or identify the operators or the points of origin.”
The DOD’s investigative efforts are constrained, it said, by its limited authority to conduct operations off military installations within the United States. Federal law also prohibits the military from engaging in domestic intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities that could potentially track the drones’ origins. Instead, military personnel work with local law enforcement agencies to pursue leads.
“We have to coordinate with law enforcement to try to do that, which we are doing,” the anonymous spokesperson said. “And we do that on a routine basis at nearly all of our locations. We have good relationships and excellent coordination, and we respond quickly to try to identify them.”
“The main point is to deter the activity using some of our electronic means that can respond to most of these small commercial systems and deny them access to the airspace over our bases,” the unnamed spokesperson said. “We don’t know what the activity is. We don’t know … if it is criminal. But I will tell you that it is irresponsible. Here on the military side, we are just as frustrated with the irresponsible nature of this activity.”
Later on Monday, a joint statement was issued by the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense:
“There are more than one million drones lawfully registered with the FAA in the United States and there are thousands of commercial, hobbyist and law enforcement drones lawfully in the sky on any given day. With the technology landscape evolving, we expect that number to increase over time.
“FBI has received tips of more than 5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks with approximately 100 leads generated, and the federal government is supporting state and local officials in investigating these reports. Consistent with each of our unique missions and authorities, we are quickly working to prioritize and follow these leads. We have sent advanced detection technology to the region. And we have sent trained visual observers.
“Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed—wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones. We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast,” the joint statement said.
“That said, we recognize the concern among many communities. We continue to support state and local authorities with advanced detection technology and support of law enforcement. We urge Congress to enact counter-UAS legislation when it reconvenes that would extend and expand existing counter—drone authorities to identify and mitigate any threat that may emerge,” the statement said.
“Additionally, there have been a limited number of visual sightings of drones over military facilities in New Jersey and elsewhere, including within restricted air space. Such sightings near or over DoD installations are not new. DoD takes unauthorized access over its airspace seriously and coordinates closely with federal, state, and local law enforcement authorities, as appropriate. Local commanders are actively engaged to ensure there are appropriate detection and mitigation measures in place,” the agency statement said.
Also on Monday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “It is critical, as we all have said for a number of years, that we need from Congress additional authorities to address the drone situation, our authorities currently are limited and they are set to expire. We need them extended and expanded. We want state and local authorities to also have the ability to counter growing activity under federal supervision…”
Later in the day, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called on Congress to pass the Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act, strengthening the FAA’s drone oversight and give states more power to investigate the sightings.
Is it a psychological operation or a way to pressure Congress by creating fear in the pubic? Many are floating those theories, including former CIA officer Laura Ballman, who is a commentator for Fox News.
“Now, in terms of who is behind this, deducing the statements that have been made by John Kirby [National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications], who has said that these objects are not operating illegally, coupled with the several op-eds that have been out the last 24 hours about the need to look at our detection systems, makes me think, perhaps, this is actually a classified exercise to test either evasion technology or detection technology in urban areas,” she said on Saturday.
It was a busy day at the Gambell Street office of the Alaska Division of Elections. A second group arrived at the office on Monday, with their petition application in hand: They, too, intend to repeal ranked-choice voting by ballot initiative in 2026.
This group is headed up by some big names in Alaska political circles: Judy Eledge, president of the Anchorage Republican Women’s Club; Bernadette Wilson, a campaign consultant and prominent business owner; and former Rep. Ken McCarty.
The group had over 250 signatures on their application for a petition. They believe they have the muscle behind them to get the repeal passed.
“Ranked Choice voting discriminates, and disenfranchises voters. $15 million of out-of-state money was spent this past election, confusing voters into thinking that a ‘no’ vote was a no to Ranked Choice Voting. If special interest want to spend another $15 million again that’s fine, but make no mistake, we will continue to fight every year and every election cycle for a transparent and timely election process,” said Wilson.
Wilson is the person who was the manager of the last conservative ballot measure to pass in Alaska — the 2010 parental notification law that pertained to minors receiving abortions.
Eledge, a longtime Republican volunteer and connected to women’s Republican groups around the state, is a strong indicator that Republican women’s clubs from Ketchikan to Kenai to Fairbanks will join her in the signature-gathering effort. The group also has people backing it who can bring in national money to help fight the dark money groups that defeated the last repeal effort.
Unlike the first repeal effort that failed this year, this repeal language is just a straight “undo” of the original 2020 ballot measure that was pushed by liberal supporters of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was trying to avoid a Republican primary. This repeal language takes everything back to how it was before jungle primaries and ranked-choice voting was authorized by voters in 2020.
Earlier in the day, Phil Izon filed his similarly worded petition with the Division of Election. He was part of the first effort to repeal the ranked-choice voting and jungle primary; that effort failed by just 743 votes after being outspent $15 million in Outside dark money to about $100,000 raised by people in Alaska who support repealing the questionable and confusing voting scheme now being used in Alaska.
With two dueling petitions that aim for the same outcome, it could get confusing. Each petition will need at least 35,000 signatures, so Alaskans may be signing both petitions. After that, it will up to the Division of Elections and Department of Law to decide whether to combine the language of the two initiatives into one question for the ballot.
Read about the other repeal application at this link:
