By james art Monday, October 28, 2024 | 10:02 in the evening
KAKTOWIK, Alaska — Early last summer, George Kaleak, a whaling captain in the small Native Alaskan village of Kaktovik, on an Arctic Ocean island just off the state’s north coast, posted a flyer on the blue bulletin board at the community center.
“Attention residents,” it said. “Looking for an election chairman to hold the August and November elections. … If interested, please contact Alaska State Elections.”
No one has been interested, Kaleak said, and the state has been unable to secure a supervisor of elections or election officials.
When the primaries arrived on August 20, the Kaktovik polling station was not open. There was nowhere for the 189 registered voters in the village to vote. Kaleak, who is also an advisor to the regional government, didn’t even try.
“I knew there was no one to open it,” he said during an interview in Kaktovik earlier this month.
The development may have shocked voters or politicians elsewhere in the US, especially in states where any voting irregularities have prompted scrutiny from party activists and news organizations, conspiracy theories spread on social media and calls for an investigation.
Life went on in Kaktovik. Some residents were disappointed, but turned their attention to a more pressing matter: the start of whaling season.
Remote villages, few voters
The closed polling station is just the latest example of ongoing voting challenges in remote Alaska Native villages, a collection of more than 200 remote communities that dot the nation’s largest state. Many of the villages are far from the main road system, so isolated that they are only accessible by small plane. Postal service can be suspended for days due to inclement weather or worker illness.
Polls were also not open for the August primary in Wells, in far western Alaska along the Bering Strait. They opened late in a few more villages. In Anaktuvuk Pass, the polling station was only open about 30 minutes before closing; only seven of the 258 registered voters there voted in person.
This year, with control of Congress on the line, the ramifications of any recurring problems during the November general election could be huge. The state’s only Democratic representative in the House of Representatives, Mary Peltola, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress. She is popular among Alaska Native voters, won the recent endorsement of the Alaska Federation of Natives and is in a tight re-election battle against Republican Nick Begich.
“This congressional seat will be won by dozens of votes,” Peltola told a federation convention this month.
State, regional and local officials say they are trying to make sure everyone can vote in the Nov. 5 election. In a written statement, Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, called her agency “heavily invested in ensuring that all precincts are staffed and that sites open on time.” She acknowledged that it can be difficult to find temporary workers to help run elections.
“Out of sight and out of mind”
Like other Native American populations, Alaska Native voters have for years faced language barriers at the polls. In 2020, the state elections department failed to send absentee ballots to the southwestern Alaskan village of Mertarvik in time for the primary election because its staff did not realize someone lived there.
In June 2022, a special primary election for the United States House of Representatives was held primarily by mail after the sudden death of Republican Representative Don Young. Some rural Alaska and lower-income urban areas had significantly high rates of rejected ballots — about 17 percent — largely because of missing witness signatures on envelopes or other errors that the state did not provide funds to correct.
Two months later, precincts in two villages in southwest Alaska – Tununak and Atmautluak – did not open for the regular primary and special general election for the US House of Representatives, which were held on the same day. Ballots from several other villages arrived too late to be fully included in the new ranked-choice voting system the state uses for general elections.
“When these things happen in rural Alaska, when it’s out of sight and out of mind, it seems like the system just shrugs it off and writes it off as a character flaw in remote Alaskans,” said Michelle Spark of the nonprofit Get Out The Native Vote “And we here say this is unacceptable.”
Alaska allows absentee voting, but that can present its own challenges given the sometimes questionable reliability of mail delivery in rural Alaska.
The Alaska Federation of Natives, the largest statewide organization of Natives in Alaska, passed a resolution last year expressing concern about postal service. It surveys residents about their postal services, including how it affects their ability to vote or get medicine.
Land of caribou, whales and polar bears
Kaktovik is 670 miles (1,078 km) north of Anchorage, on Barter Island, between the Arctic Ocean and Alaska’s North Slope, an area of vast treeless tundra nearly the size of Oregon. Temperatures can drop to 20 below zero F (29 below C) during the eternal darkness of winter. Air transport provides the only year-round access to Kaktovik, with ocean barges delivering goods during the warmer months.
It is the only community in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and whether the next presidential administration will support oil drilling in the reserve – as many villagers hope – is a major topic of concern. The nearest town is Deadhorse, about 110 miles (177 kilometers) west, the oil company’s supply stop that marks the end of the gravel road featured on the reality TV show “Ice Road Truckers.”
Kaktovik’s approximately 270 residents, mostly Inupiat, live in one-story houses spread over a grid of about 20 blocks. They subsist by hunting caribou and bowhead whales; village whalers landed three scallops this year.
After butchering the whales on a nearby beach, villagers pile the bones farther away, where polar bears feast on the remains. This made Kaktovik a popular place for polar bear tourism. The village also has a polar bear patrol led by village mayor Nathan Gordon Jr. to chase the animals out of town when they get too close.
During the August primary, some residents were out hunting or fishing. The mayor was vacationing with his family in Anchorage.
Constraints abound in polling station recruitment
Madeline Gordon, a former election official, had started a new job at a rural grocery store. Gordon, the mayor’s cousin, said she told the Nome office of the state Division of Elections in early summer that she wouldn’t be able to run in the primary, but the state sent a box of ballots to her home anyway.
She gave the box to the city clerk, Tiffany Kayotuk. A state official told Kayotuk to stay put until further notice, Kayotuk said. The box was still in her office when she went on maternity leave on the day of the primary.
It was clear well in advance that Kaktovik would need help running the primaries.
Kaleak, the deputy councilman for the regional North Slope Borough — the equivalent of a county government in other states — posted the flyer seeking help for the election on the bulletin board at the community center. Until recently, it still hung there, near one for the volunteer fire department and another for the local fuel depot. It also posts notices on a Facebook community page.
But the position requires travel to Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, for training. And Kaleak said the pay — $20.50 an hour — isn’t enough to be attractive in a village where gas is $7.50 a gallon and other long-haul goods are just as expensive. Small pumpkins were going for $80 a piece this month.
Taylor Thompson, who heads the legal department for the North Slope borough, said a borough official contacted the state elections department before the August primary to find out if they expected trouble and offered to send a borough official to the village if is necessary.
“The state just didn’t take us up on it,” Thompson said.
She said she was “lost” when she learned from a news article that the Kaktovik section was not open. This time the municipality sends a worker to Kaktovik to ensure the opening of the sections for the general elections.
“We’re going to make sure somebody is there, no matter what, if the state isn’t going to meet its obligations,” Thompson said.
Determined to ensure that voters are not disenfranchised again
The district was also trying to coordinate with the state to ensure it would have staff in two other villages, Nuixut and Anaktuvuk Pass.
Beecher, the director of elections, said the state was notified late the afternoon before the primary election that Kaktovik had no one to conduct the election. The department immediately reached out to the village and neighborhood in hopes of finding someone, she said.
“Unfortunately, despite best efforts, sometimes trained personnel are no longer available, requiring the department to secure other workers and train them in a short period of time,” Beecher said.
The mayor said he heard it when he returned from vacation.
“I ended up going back and hearing how the primaries weren’t open and how people had to miss their first election,” Gordon Jr. said.
Charles Lampe, the president of the Kaktovik Inupiat Corp. and a city council member, supports training city officials to work in elections. That way, he said, “nothing like this will ever happen again.”
For Kaleak, disenfranchising Alaska Native voters should be as outraged as disenfranchising voters anywhere else in the country.
“Every person should be able to vote and it should count and it should be fair,” he said.
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Bohrer reported from Juneau, Alaska. Johnson reported from Seattle.