Hacking the Election for Alaska Governor

It is not just the Hillary campaign or the Russians who are mucking around in elections these days.  Two of the gubernatorial candidates, Bill Walker and Mark Begich have diddled the system over the years to get elected.  They are quite good at it.  And they are up to it again.

The news of the last week is that LtGov Byron Mallott resigned his office reportedly after propositioning a 16 – 17-year-old.  Given his age, I expect this was neither the first time he’s done this and that it was a surprise to anyone.  This leads directly to the thought that this may have been a planned event rather than an accidental one.  https://craigmedred.news/2018/10/19/hidden-story/

This put Bill Walker in an untenable position, and he announced he was suspending his campaign in front of the AFN convention here in Anchorage last Thursday.  Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on your point of view), ballots are already printed and over 3,000 absentee ballots have already been voted.  http://www.ktva.com/story/39322301/walker-suspends-campaign-for-reelection

This leaves essentially a two-man race between democrat Mark Begich and Republican Mike Dunleavey for Alaska governor.

The story of Begich and Walker’s rise through Alaska politics is a story of election hacking by both, aided, abetted, planned and cheered on by the unions.

Begich would have never been elected for his first term as mayor over incumbent George Wuerch had a friendly Anchorage Assembly not changed runoff requirements from 50%+1 to 45%+1 retroactively before the election.  His arrangement with Rick Mystrom to split the Republican vote didn’t hurt either.  He avoided a runoff by a handful of votes in 2003.

In similar fashion, he rode the fraudulent indictment, trial and conviction of Ted Stevens to a term in the US Senate in 2008, where he was the single vote that passed O’BamaCare in 2010.

And he would not have been elected to either office without strong, lockstep support from Alaska unions.

As for Bill Walker, he ran for governor and lost the to Sean Parnell in the Republican primary in 2010.  Four years later, he came up with a different approach, that of running as an independent.  Like this year, there were three leading candidates in 2014 for Alaska governor, Sean Parnell, Walker’s independent ticket, and a democrat ticket headed by Byron Mallott.

This was unacceptable to the unions backing both Mallott and Walker, so they brokered a back room deal, at least a week after state law allowed ballot changes, and merged the two tickets into the so-called Unity Ticket, with Walker running as governor and Mallott as LtGov.  They got Judge Suddock to rewrite state election law on the fly using the excuse that the merger created an emergency situation.

Interesting, as buffoonery by democrats and union-backed independents does not constitute an emergency in my mind.  Perhaps I am missing something.

Fast forward four years and we have all three of the major players at it again, diddling the state election system to put one of their candidates in the best position to win what started out as a 3-way split of an election.

The technique seems to be the same as we saw four years ago.  Rumored meetings between the two campaigns.  Union bosses getting worried and holding meetings.  And a surprising resignation at the last minute closely followed by Walker suspending his campaign.  Walker, who was a lifelong Republican chooses to back Mark Begich for election.  https://mustreadalaska.com/unions-have-emergency-meeting-in-anchorage/

The only good news is that we don’t have Judge Suddock rewriting state election law on the fly again.  Yet.

What are we going to see the next couple of weeks?  Probably the filthiest, lowest, dirtiest, nastiest political campaign out of union-backed Unite Alaska, Robin Brena, and Mark Begich that we have seen since Mark’s reelection bid in 2014.  They will say a lot of things about Mike Dunleavy, and the only accurate thing they will do may be to spell his name correctly.

We have spent a lot of time worrying about foreign meddling in national elections over the last couple of years.  For some reason we put up with last minute election hacking by local unions, well-funded lawyers, Mark Begich, and that old hacker himself, Bill Walker.

Unlike international election hacking, this one we can do something about.  And that would be to not reward Begich, Walker or the unions backing them for their actions.

 

Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He is a small business owner and Information Technology professional.