Three of the bigger tools in Alaska politics, Jason Grenn, Bonnie Jack and Bruce Botelho are the front people for a ballot initiative entitled Alaska’s Better Elections.
The effort ostensibly claims to prohibit the use of dark money, establish an open primary system, change appointment procedures for election boards, watchers and APOC, establish a ranked-choice general election system, support an amendment to the US Constitution, repeal special runoff elections, change requirements for election pamphlets and polling places, and amend the definition of a political party.
By my count, that is a single ballot initiative trying to do 7 things, a sneaky ballot technique known as logrolling. Normally the Alaska courts are quick to toss anything that remotely smells like more than a single topic for any ballot initiative. Not so for this one, as the backers found a suitably corrupt Superior Court judge who thinks rewriting the entire structure of elections here in Alaska is just fine. Perhaps the only good out of this will be yet another demonstration of the rank corruption of the Alaska judiciary.
The backers wrote an ADN piece early November in support of the initiative. Paul Jenkins and Suzanne Downing both responded with columns noting the irony of a group purporting a rewrite of state election law to eliminate the evils of dark money is almost entirely funded by dark money. Who knew?
The biggest backer of this is a tax-exempt non-profit from MA called RepresentUs, who has already contributed over $10,000 in in-kind donations to Grenn’s Alaska for Better Elections. These guys were last in the state writing Grenn’s disastrous HB 44 ethics legislation in 2018. RepresentUs is in turn funded by the Tides Foundation, the Park Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund, currently fighting against Pebble.
So, what is going on here?
It all comes down to your definition of what you think is a better election. In the eyes of these guys and their backers, there are not enough democrats elected here in Alaska, so they are busily attempting to change election law so there are. We see this all the time in the Lower 48, where the very first thing that democrats do once taking office are to change election laws so that they never lose again. When they are unable to win at the ballot box, they take their argument to court and try to get the courts to rewrite election law.
The very first thing the democrat congress did in 1993 was Motor Voter, which was the first thing signed by newly elected Bill Clinton, making it easier to register new democrats. The very first thing Nancy Pelosi’s new House majority did in 2019 was to pass a sweeping nationalization of election law intended to elect democrats. This was even more important than impeaching President Trump. We’ve even seen it here in Anchorage with the passage of vote by mail under the current Anchorage Assembly and Ethan Berkowitz.
In this, democrats have much the same view of democracy as Turkish President Erdogan – One man, one vote, one time or “democracy is like a train; you get off once you reach your destination.”
The current single party disaster in California arose on the back of election reform. So did the one in Oregon. And now the very same people who helped construct single party Nirvanas in those states are doing their level best to bring that clown show here to Alaska by logrolling, bundling multiple efforts of varying popularity with one that is desirable (for who can ever oppose better elections?), hoping the desirable one will drag all the others across the finish line with it. This is why Alaska courts used to summarily reject anything other than a single topic ballot initiative.
Keep an eye on this, as you don’t need 26 pages of legalese to clean up elections here in Alaska. All you need is complete transparency in spending and non-spending support, something democrats and their supporters abhor. If Grenn’s history with ballot initiatives is any indication (his disastrous ethics initiative for the legislature), this will not only be confusing, but an unmitigated disaster should it make its way past the ballot. But at least we’ll elect more democrats (/sarc).
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 was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
