Alaska Natives endorse ranked choice voting, Mary Peltola

Joaqlin Estus
ICT

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Delegates to the Alaska Federation of Natives convention voted to oppose a measure Saturday that would do away with the state’s open primaries and ranked choice voting. AFN delegates represent nine Alaska Native regional and 154 village for-profit corporations, 174 federally recognized tribes, and nine regional non-profit entities.

Ranked choice voting allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins at least 50 percent plus one of the total votes, there’s a runoff based on those preferences.

The AFN resolution said the process provides more opportunities for Alaska Natives to run for public office and get elected, as well as more freedom and more choice. The current system also “allows for more influence and greater participation among Alaskans, decentralizing power and empowering voters.”

The delegates also adopted a resolution endorsing U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, who is Yup’ik, as Alaska’s sole representative to Congress. She’s the first Alaska Native member of Congress. She’s in a tight race to hold on to her position in Alaska, which typically votes Republican.

Peltola, a Democrat, bills herself as someone who works to protect Alaska’s fish. The resolution describes her as a “strong advocate for Alaska’s fisheries and subsistence users,” who has served “her entire lifetime and professional career working for Alaska Natives” on a wide range of issues.

The resolutions came two days after Peltola told the AFN audience of more than a thousand people, “there is a concerted effort to erase us…a concerted effort to silence your votes, to make it harder for you to vote.”

Peltola described the Speaker of the state House of Representatives, Cathy Tilton, a Republican, as saying, “no, we didn’t want to make voting easier… it would help Mary Peltola.”

Republican members had blocked an election reform bill that would have dropped a witness signature requirement for by-mail absentee ballots. That would reduce the disproportionate rejection rate for ballots from rural Alaska, which is predominantly Alaska Native. Tilton told the host of an Oct. 9 radio show (at about 46:55) the reform would have leaned the election toward Peltola.

The Alaska Federation of Natives expressed concern that state representatives would work to take away people’s right to vote in order to prevent the election of a specific candidate.

However, a different convention speaker showed another barrier to Alaska Native election clout: voter apathy.

In a session entitled, “Unlocking the Power of the Native Vote,” Michelle Sparck, Yup’ik, spoke. She is director of Alaska’s Get Out The Native Vote. She compared data from the 1982 election to 2022 numbers. An initiative that would have removed the rural priority for subsistence was on the earlier ballot.

Turnout in 1982 was noteworthy, she said. “We defeated that ballot initiative by 66.23 percent as a community, as a people.” In contrast, the more recent election had an average turnout of Alaska Natives of just 28.19 percent, Sparck said.

She said, “We represent a quarter of the vote…If we start to vote at our power, at our population, we are a formidable group.”

“We’re not here to tell you who to vote for or how to vote,” Sparck said. “We’re just here to make sure you can vote and use your civil rights, use your constitutional right to vote in every election: local, regional, statewide, federal.”

Still, disenfranchising Alaska Native voters has a long history in Alaska, according to James Tucker, a senior lawyer with the Native American Voting Rights Coalition. He gave a history of Native civil rights in Alaska in the same convention session as Sparck.

In 1922, Chief Shakes, Tlingit, also known as Charlie Jones, was arrested for attempting to vote. Tucker showed a slide of jury instructions that said to legally cast a ballot, Jones would have had to set aside all of his tribal culture, his relations, and not associate with his tribe anymore. He would have had to adopt what non-Natives called a “civilized” way of life. Attorney William Paul, Sr., Tlingit, won the suit, winning Natives the right to vote.

Tucker said that led to a backlash by non-Natives. “They saw that even though a very small number of Natives were registered to vote and had voted in the 1924 elections, they wanted to make sure that — because Natives comprised the vast majority of the people who lived in Alaska — they did not exercise their ability to vote for a majority and have a majority share of the territorial legislature and school boards. And so you see some ads that were actually put into the newspapers targeting Alaska Natives who were trying to vote.”

Tucker said it got worse when Paul became the first Alaska Native elected to the territorial legislature in 1924. “What ended up happening is just one year later, less than a year after the Indian Citizenship Act became law, Alaska’s territorial legislature passed a literacy test that was specifically intended to disenfranchise Alaska Natives from being able to vote in elections,” Tucker said.

Tucker said the literacy test came atop a system that discriminated to keep Natives from getting an education. From its earliest days, he said, Alaska had segregated and unequal school systems for Natives and non-Natives, a situation that continued into the 1980s.

In 2017 Tucker wrote an article on two lawsuits filed to achieve equality for Native voters: Nick v. Bethel and Toyukak v. Treadwell.

“In the end,” Tucker wrote, “the court’s decision in Toyukak came down to a comparison of just two pieces of evidence: (1) the Official Election Pamphlet that English-speaking voters received that was often more than 100 pages long; and (2) the single sheet of paper that Alaska Native language speakers received, containing only the date, time, and location of the election, along with a notice that they could request language assistance. Those two pieces of evidence, when set side by side, showed the fundamental unequal access to the ballot.”

Still, Peltola said, “Hey, if we can survive in Alaska for over 12,000 years, we know how to find the polling place. We know how to mail in a ballot. We know how to do this.”

Absentee voting in Alaska started on Monday.

Disclosure: Chief Shakes, or Charlie Jones, is the author’s great-grandfather and William Paul, Sr., is her great-uncle.

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