Category: Alaska News

In August, more than 70% of participating Alaska voters supported Ballot Measure 1, voting to restrict the amount of money that individuals can contribute to campaigns for state office.

On Nov. 3, Alaskans will vote on Ballot Measure 2, and an overlooked section of that measure — intended to roll back the state’s election system to what it was in 2020 — almost certainly would repeal part of Ballot Measure 1.

“I mean, people are like, why didn’t you raise this earlier? I’m like, it’s got 91 sections, and I literally didn’t notice,” said Scott Kendall, the author of Alaska’s existing elections system and an attorney fighting Ballot Measure 2.

In 2020, Alaskans passed a different Ballot Measure 2. It installed three major changes to the state’s election system: An open primary, where all candidates run together, and the top four advance to the general election; a ranked choice general election, where voters sort those four candidates in order of preference; and a disclosure law requiring third-party groups to disclose their donors when the groups donate to political candidates and causes.

This year’s Ballot Measure 2 seeks to repeal all three parts, returning Alaska elections to what they were in 2020.

There’s also a new wrinkle because of this year’s Ballot Measure 1.

Passed by voters in August, Ballot Measure 1 limits the amount of money that someone can donate to a candidate. That includes governor and lieutenant governor candidates who run together as a single ticket.

That single-ticket system was installed in 2020’s Ballot Measure 2. Ballot Measure 1 limited donations to that single ticket, putting the limits in Alaska Statute 15.13.070(g).

Ballot Measure 2 seeks to get rid of the combined single-ticket campaign, and Section 5 states, “AS 15.13.070(g) is repealed.”

That would get rid of the combined donation limit for governor and lieutenant governor. But some state officials say another law may then come into play. 

Because candidates would — if Ballot Measure 2 passes — be running separately, they may be limited by a different part of Ballot Measure 1, AS 15.13.070(b), which applies to individual candidates.

That’s the position held by Alaska Public Offices Commission director Heather Hebdon. APOC is in charge of enforcing Alaska’s campaign finance laws.

By email, Hebdon said that if Ballot Measure 2 passes, “contribution limits for gubernatorial candidates would fall under those found in AS 15.13.070(b)(c) and (f).”

She believes APOC would likely write new regulations to deal with those limits’ applicability to governor and lieutenant governor candidates.

Kendall said he isn’t sure about that. 

“I will say it’s really legally tenuous. I think when you have a statute that says a thing and you explicitly repeal that thing, you get what you get,” he said.

He also observed that in 2021, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Alaska’s prior limits on political donations, APOC attempted but failed to preserve a limit for the state’s 2022 elections.

Supporters of Ballot Measure 2 said they don’t have a position on the issue.

“Repeal Now wrote Ballot Measure 2 as a full and complete repeal of the 2020 ballot measure that brought ranked choice voting to Alaska. We are unaware of any effect on Ballot Measure 1 and thus can’t comment on that,” said Bethany Marcum, treasurer of Repeal Now, the leading group behind Ballot Measure 2. 

Craig Richards, a former attorney general who represented Repeal Now in court, said he was unfamiliar with the issue.

The Alaska Department of Law also declined to make a definitive statement on the topic.

Sam Curtis, a spokesman for the department, said by email that attorneys within the Alaska Legislature would make the final determination of what happens if Ballot Measure 2 passes.

That’s because the revisor of statutes — an obscure staff official — is in charge of mediating disputes between enacted laws.

Emily Nauman, the Legislature’s chief attorney, declined to say how the Legislature might interpret any conflict. 

Rep. Calvin Schrage, I-Anchorage and a sponsor of Ballot Measure 1, said earlier this month that he has requested that Nauman’s office deliver a written ruling on the issue, but as of Tuesday afternoon, that memo had not yet been completed.

The Alaska Supreme Court has dealt with similar issues before. In 2021 and in 2006, the court ruled that later laws trump earlier ones.

“In general, if two statutes conflict, then the later in time controls over the earlier, and the specific controls over the general,” the court wrote in a 2006 decision.

On Sept. 11, Schrage said he doesn’t like the idea of repealing a campaign finance limit.

“It seems to fly in the face of what Alaskan voters have time and time again reaffirmed as a priority for them,” he said.

The Alaska Supreme Court had an opportunity earlier this month to address the issue but declined to take it up.

During arguments over the proper description of Ballot Measure 2 on the November election ballot, Kendall sought to bring up the Section 5 issue.

The court rejected Kendall’s attempt, saying it hadn’t been properly briefed beforehand.

As a result, the final description on the ballot says only that Ballot Measure 2 would “remove the limits on donations to joint campaigns for governor and lieutenant governor.” 

It doesn’t say whether anything will replace them. 

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Following a ruling by the Alaska Court of Appeals, the Alaska Department of Law has dropped criminal charges against 11 American Samoan residents of Whittier who were accused of illegal voting.

American Samoans are U.S. nationals but not citizens and thus cannot vote in Alaska elections. 

State prosecutors charged Tupe Smith and 10 other Whittier residents with voting illegally after Smith won a local school board race in 2022.  

All 11 said they were unaware that they could not vote in local elections and said they were misinformed by local elections officials. 

Smith, who was charged in 2023, sought to have her case dismissed. A Superior Court judge denied that request, but Smith appealed, and the Court of Appeals ruled this month that in order to convict someone of voting illegally, prosecutors must prove that someone intentionally sought to deceive elections officials when they cast an illegal vote.

The Department of Law had brought charges against Smith and others under a different standard, one that doesn’t require an intent to deceive. 

Rather than appeal the Court of Appeals interpretation to the Alaska Supreme Court, the Department of Law dropped the charges.

“Our prosecutors have an obligation to follow the law as it is written and to apply it faithfully to the cases before us,” said Acting Alaska Attorney General Cori Mills in a statement published Friday. “It is sometimes the case that courts reach a different conclusion about what the law requires the state to prove, as the Court of Appeals has done here. This requires us to re-evaluate whether the state can prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt under the new standard, and after reviewing the decision and applying the facts, we don’t think we can do that.”

Attorneys for Smith and the other Whittier residents accused of wrongdoing said they were happy with the result but disappointed that it took years to resolve.

“We could not have been happier when we heard the news. This was a major stress. It feels like a dark cloud hanging over our heads has been removed. I could not help but worry about worst-case scenarios, and how to deal with not seeing my kids if I’m taken away to prison,” said Michael Pese, Smith’s husband and one of the 10 other American Samoans charged by the state. 

“It feels good after everything we’ve been through. We are relieved to no longer have to worry about who will watch our kids if we are both put in jail,” Smith said.

“The state’s dismissal of charges is welcome, but these searches, arrests and prosecutions should never have been done in the first place,” said Charles Ala’ilima, an American Samoan attorney who represented Smith and Michael Pese, her husband. 

“These prosecutions were traumatizing, not just for those charged, but for the entire American Samoan community in Alaska. It opens all of our eyes to the real difficulties we face as American Samoans because of our current ambiguous and, in my opinion, unconstitutional, noncitizen second-class legal status imposed by federal statute,” Ala’ilima added.

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The Arctic Report Card, the annual peer-reviewed analysis of climate in the circumpolar region, will continue even without federal government support, scientists announced.

The American Geophysical Union, an organization representing tens of thousands of Earth and space scientists, announced last week that it has taken over as manager of the Arctic Report Card after the Trump administration pulled support last month.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was, until this summer, the agency that coordinated and published the annual report since the inaugural edition in 2006.

But the Trump administration has slashed funding for climate science work at NOAA and other federal agencies, and Trump himself has repeatedly referred to climate change as a “hoax.”

The annual Arctic Report Card is now one of several NOAA climate-related programs which the Trump administration has eliminated or reduced.

The report provides status updates for permafrost thaw, sea ice extent, air temperatures, wildlife patterns, tundra vegetation and other subjects. It places a heavy emphasis on Alaska. Researchers from UAF and other Alaska universities are prominent among the chapter authors, and in recent years the report has included analysis from Indigenous Alaska scientists and community members.

Under AGU oversight, the Arctic Report Card’s editorial team remains intact, with continued leadership by researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Colorado. Rick Thoman of UAF’s Alaska Center for Climate Change Preparedness remains one of the three main editors. The other two are from the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, which includes the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In a statement, one of the Colorado-based lead editors said the Arctic Report Card’s survival was a victory against censorship of climate science.

“Beyond the importance of sharing this key science, the fact that we can pull together and ensure the Arctic Report Card goes forward is a sign that science won’t be stopped or silenced,” Matthew Druckenmiller, a senior NSIDC scientist, said in the statement. “When we come together, we have a powerful platform for robust observational evidence to inform global decisions – we are counting on that same spirit of support to help us close the remaining funding gap and secure the report card’s future.”

This year and beyond

The AGU will issue the 2026 Arctic Report Card at its annual conference in December, the same event at which NOAA issued past report cards.

Thoman noted that much of the work was already completed before NOAA announced its withdrawal from the project, so changes might not be obvious.

“I suspect 2026 will have a look and feel very similar to what we’ve done in the past,” he said.

This year’s report will include, along with the usual updates on ice, air temperature, ocean and tundra conditions, some special chapters of interest to Alaska, Thoman said.

One chapter will examine Indigenous wildfire management practices, and another chapter will examine wildfire patterns more broadly, he said. There will be a polar bear update, he said. And a chapter led by UAF geophysicist Andy Mahoney will examine changes in shorefast ice, the land-attached type of ice that is important to Arctic coastal communities.

Beyond this year, the shape of future Arctic Report Cards “is really not thought out,” Thoman said.

Some operation changes are already underway.

The editors and authors are no longer using archived data, images or other information from climate.gov, a NOAA climate information website that the Trump administration took down last year. Instead, they are using an alternative nonprofit site called climate.us.

That site was established and is maintained in part by some of the same NOAA scientists and staffers who had worked on climate.gov but lost their agency jobs. “They know what they’re doing,” Thoman said.

The editors will be turning to an international source, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme of the eight-nation Arctic Council, for assistance with peer reviews. There might be similar outreach on other tasks, Thoman said. “There could be more robust international collaboration,” he said.

Trump administration policies on climate change

The end to NOAA support for the Arctic Report Card comes amid similar cuts.

Last year, for example, NOAA pulled its support for the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s satellite-based sea ice tracing program. The Colorado-based center switched to more reliance on satellite data from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, that nation’s counterpart to NASA.

Trump administration officials have expressed particular animus toward NOAA.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration, recommended breaking up NOAA. The agency’s six science-focused divisions, which include the National Marine Fisheries Service and the National Weather Service, “form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 said.

Russell Vought, the lead author of Project 2025, now heads Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. He is seeking to dismantle the 66-year-old National Center for Atmospheric Research, a university-managed institution in Colorado that partners with NOAA. That effort has been blocked by legal challenges.

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