The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly considered three changes to the borough’s election process that are designed to target transparency and voter turnout at its meeting last night, Aug. 1. The assembly rejected an advisory vote about whether to move municipal and state elections to the same date, but did approve a citizen group to make recommendations about the election process.
Before the assembly’s last meeting in July, Kenai Assembly Member Richard Derkevorkian introduced the first of those three ideas. It’s an ordinance that would have let the public vote on moving municipal and state elections to the same date. Municipal elections are normally held in October, while state and federal are hosted in November.
That plan quickly garnered pushback from the cities of Homer, Seward and Soldotna, as well as plenty of members of the public. Last night, Homer Mayor Ken Castner spoke against the idea.
“The only municipality that has tried this was the municipality of Anchorage and that was short lived, they moved right back to April after, I think, trying it out once and realizing how unhandy it was,” he said.
Castner said Homer has an agreement with other municipalities to effectively coordinate elections, and this would disrupt that efficiency. Other Homer residents spoke about the difficulties of hosting two elections on the same day. Some critiqued combining the partisan state or federal elections with nonpartisan municipal votes.
Derkevorkian pushed back against claims that the dual election would be too difficult to execute.
“We’re not pioneering this. The Mat-Su has successfully conducted elections exactly like this for the last four election cycles. We’re not breaking ground in Alaska, we’re not doing something that’s never been done,” he said. “While you try to make it sound like it would be quite chaotic, the Mat-Su has done it for four election cycles.”
Some spoke up in support of the change, saying it could boost voter turnout.
The assembly debated the logistics of a possible same-day election, and rejected the advisory vote plan 2-7. The yes votes were from Derkevorkian and Sterling member Bill Elam.
But the second change to borough elections did pass. The assembly approved the creation of an advisory group tasked with finding solutions to low voter turnout. Over the course of three meetings, the 14-member group will come up with recommendations on how to increase awareness of local elections.
Co-sponsor Tyson Cox said he hoped the group would solve a problem that changing the election date might.
“There were several for and several against the idea of having an advisory vote, but what they were really talking about was increasing our voter turnout,” he said. “And every single one agreed on that, they just didn’t agree on the path. So that’s kind of why I brought this forward as an alternative to an advisory vote.”
The assembly passed it unanimously, following some back-and-forth about the size of the group, which ultimately remained the same.
The assembly also unanimously passed a third change to local elections, which makes code changes to the election procedure, including revisions of the timeline and process for counting ballots and the rules for write-in candidates. It also requires at least one randomly-selected precinct to hand-count all their votes.
The upcoming municipal election is on Oct. 3. The filing period for candidates opened Aug. 1 and goes through Aug. 15. There are seats up for election on the borough assembly, board of education, and on city councils.
