While her campaign staff was operating what appeared to be an illegal a game of chance at her campaign booth last week at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention, Rep. Mary Peltola was on stage playing the race card and playing it hard:
“There is a concerted effort to erase us. There is a concerted effort to silence our votes, to make it harder for you to vote,” she said, referring to a failed piece of legislation that would have allowed people to mail in their ballots without even so much as a witness’ signature.
The irony of running a game of chance for t-shirts, berry buckets, and bumper stickers — without a visible state permit — in order to harvest voter names and addresses, at the same time insulting rural voters by implying they are incompetent was not lost on observers at AFN.
Not requiring a witness’ signature is the smallest of hurdles to voting, which started weeks ago with absentee by-mail ballots.
To vote by absentee by-mail ballot, a person has to send in a request to the Division of Elections. Then, the voter must mark the ballot, put it in its security envelope and mailing envelope, and affix two regular postage stamps, and mail it back by Nov. 5.
But Democrats think rural voters cannot get that one step right, which is someone’s signature who is attesting that the person voting that ballot is who he or she says they are. Peltola says this is an affront to “us,” and to “our votes.”
The irony was not lost on some who went to the AFN convention. AFN not only allowed Peltola free rein on the convention stage to campaign, it refused to allow Republican candidate Nick Begich even one minute to get up to the stage and say hello to the convention goers.
Rather than silencing Native votes, as Peltola claimed is being done by non-Native Alaskan, AFN was, in fact, silencing non-Native voices, by preventing a leading Republican candidate from even being heard by delegates.
During Peltola’s speech, in which she spoke the remarks about the “silencing” of Native votes, she didn’t mention that her opponent had been banned by Natives from the stage, and she did not rise to defend the principle of fairness for Nick Begich.
