Native Leaders Organize to Defend Alaska’s Ranked Choice Voting System

As Alaskans consider this fall whether to repeal their new ranked-choice voting election system, leaders of the state’s Native tribes have emerged as key defenders of the system. They’re working to mobilize Alaska Natives, who make up roughly 20 percent of the state’s population, against repeal. 

It was just four years ago that voters approved the switch to this new way of running elections. But Republicans have lashed out against the change ever since Democrat Mary Peltola won the first election held under the new rules in 2022, flipping Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat. This also made Peltola the first Alaska Native to join Congress.

Alaskans for Honest Elections, an organization founded in early 2023 in opposition to ranked-choice voting, put an initiative on the ballot this fall to turn back the clock. If Measure 2 passes in November, it would end Alaska’s novel system, under which the state holds an open primary, with all candidates running on one ballot regardless of party, and then the top four candidates face off in a ranked-choice general election. Instead, the state would return to a more conventional approach: partisan primaries, followed by a first-past-the-post election. 

Alaska Native leaders are now working to consolidate support for the open primary and ranked-choice voting system. The state’s largest tribal organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), formally endorsed the new rules last year at its annual convention.

The AFN adopted a resolution that said the system better represents Native voters by allowing “more freedom, more choice, more influence, and greater participation.”

AFN members have since launched a coordinated campaign to persuade voters to oppose Measure 2. Native leaders say they’ll be reaching people through public radio, local newspapers and pop-up events in rural areas. 

“No system is going to be perfect. Ranked-choice voting gets us closer to something that is equitable,” said Barbara ‘Wáahlaal Gidaag Blake, an elected board member of the Sealaska Corporation, one of Alaska’s regional organizations that manages Indigenous land claims.

Proponents of the 2020 reform are making the case that most Native voters in Alaska are not registered with a party, and that the open primary system is more inclusive for independent voters, helping energize disaffected voters. “Alaskans should be able to choose a person, not a political party, and trust that the process will encourage good public policy,” says the AFN’s resolution.

For Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out the Native Vote, an organization affiliated with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council that promotes turnout in Native communities, the change to the elections system opens up the field to lesser known candidates. “Anybody can run,” she told Bolts. “You don’t have to have the party’s blessing and backing, and that does change things a lot. You have more unique and representative people on that ballot than we have ever seen before.” 

“And a lot of them look like us, and that was exciting too,” added Sparck, who is a member of Chevak’s Qissunamiut Tribe.

The mistrust many Alaska Natives feel towards the political system extends far beyond the exact mechanics of voting. But to Native groups that support the change, the new voting system has been a step towards repairing past harms by bolstering Native representation, and they’re frustrated to see that the state may roll back a reform they believe has worked in their favor.

A long history of voter suppression and gerrymandering, familiar to Indigenous populations throughout the United States, have dampened Alaska Natives’ political power. The geography of the land presents logistical challenges as well. Many Natives live in villages spread across the vast Alaskan Bush, disconnected from major roadways and separated from regional hubs by the rugged landscape that can only be traversed by small plane or by boat. Election administration in the region regularly falls short. There are also at least 20 distinct language groups among Alaska Natives, an additional challenge for political campaigns and organizers.

The federal Voting Rights Act requires that election communications in some parts of the state be conducted in at least one Native language so voters know how to vote, and understand what is on the ballot, but this is often not implemented well. Speakers of Yup’ik, the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in Alaska, sued the state in 2013 with the backing of Native rights groups for failing to provide language assistance. A federal judge ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2014, and a settlement agreement required Alaska to improve language accessibility. 

But Native rights groups say the state never fully complied with the court order, and the settlement was extended through 2026. “There’s off-and-on legal battles over access to polling stations, and about having voter pamphlets in languages that we can understand since English is not the first language everywhere, and it is a journey just to get to the capitol for most folks,” said Joe Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN.

For Blake, those electoral difficulties magnify the disillusionment that many Alaska Natives have towards a political system that has continuously exploited their resources, lands and communities.

“There are inequities and biases built into every aspect of our government,” said Blake. “Our constitution recognizes the pioneers of Alaska and everybody that came after. Even in our constitution, we are forgotten. At the founding of our state, we weren’t even allowed to vote.” 

“It makes it really hard to get our people, who have felt generations of disenfranchisement, erasure, and racism, excited about stepping foot into those spaces,” she added. “It is a matter of getting our people comfortable in these spaces that have never ever written laws that feel like they are on our side.” 

Blake regrets that many Alaska politicians don’t talk about how to preserve the subsistence lifestyles prevalent in Alaska Native towns in remote parts of the state, and don’t help residents in those regions keep living off the land so communities can continue their traditional practices and way of life. “All of our people still hunt, fish and gather the same way our ancestors did,” Blake said. “But it’s a slow death by a thousand cuts, where each generation doesn’t realize the rights of hunting, fishing and gathering that are being stripped away from them.”

Peltola, Alaska’s newest member of Congress, hails from the Bethel region, in the Bush, and she has focused on fishing issues since joining the House. She once worked as executive director of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, and she has even missed some sessions of Congress to help her family store fish for the winter. 

“The fact that every summer she gets out there to fish for salmon, smoke it and dry it and share it with family—she is very much a subsistence driven person who lives off the land,” said Nelson. “Many of us consider ourselves salmon people, we really rely on the rivers and oceans here to provide for us.”

Turnout is typically much lower in primaries than in November. But under Alaska’s old system in place through 2020, the summer primary was what decided the final winner in many races—for instance in legislative districts that overwhelmingly lean in one direction or another. 

In the new system, major decisions always take place in the higher-turnout general elections, since the primary’s leading candidates make it all the way there regardless of party. Voters in the fall rank as many of the candidates as they choose; once votes are tabulated, the candidate with the least first-choice support is eliminated and the totals are retabulated based on voters’ ranked preferences, until a winner emerges who has more than 50 percent of the vote. 

Partisan primaries were “a playground of the party faithful,” Sparck said, and it was hard to draw voters in. “It’s hard to compete with the summer. It’s hard to compete with subsistence. How many people in the villages are just out in the wilderness trying to survive, trying to stock our freezers for the winter?”

Until 2020, voters who wanted to take part in the primary had to choose either a Democrat or Republican ballot to participate; critics of this older system say this was a turn-off to independents, preventing them from picking candidates they like in different parties’ contests. 

Now voters can pick candidates from different parties. In the 2022 open primary, the first of its kind, almost half of Alaskans chose candidates from different parties, according to a report prepared by the organization Get Out the Native Vote. 

The shift proved particularly helpful for Native voters to express their preferences: In districts with a predominantly Native population, 80 percent of voters split their ballot.

“More than anywhere else in the state, voters in predominantly Alaska Native communities supported a list of candidates and expressed preferences that would have been impossible to support in a partisan primary,” Burke Croft, deputy data director with Ship Creek Group, a political consulting firm that led the data analysis for the report. “Partisan primaries disadvantage people who want to express preferences across party lines.”

One concern voiced by critics of the ranked-choice system is that it leads some people to waste their vote: If they haven’t ranked enough candidates, their preference may not influence the final rounds of the tabulation. This is called an exhausted ballot.

A recent study by Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, found that in Alaska’s 2022 election, voters in predominantly Native districts were more likely to end up with exhausted ballots than the rest of the population. The finding was part of broader results that indicated that ranked-choice voting may dilute the voting power of minority voters. The study was released in January by the Center for Election Confidence, an organization that opposes ranked-choice voting.

In an interview with Bolts, McCarty said this may be due to the fact that fewer candidates make direct appeals to voters of color and to Indigeneous communities. 

“I think certain groups are just not mobilized to cast second ballots,” he said. “Voters often only rank multiple candidates if those candidates make appeals to them,” he said. That may change if future candidates “find it beneficial to reach out to those groups to get those second and third place rankings.”

Organizers say they’re working with voters to minimize ballot exhaustion. But some also push back on the notion that an exhausted ballot is a wasted vote. It still allows voters to express their preferences, Croft said, including by withholding a vote in protest against a candidate that doesn’t align with their values.

“We need to understand that [an exhausted ballot] can be a viable, intentional choice rather than disenfranchisement,” Croft said. “Any time a voter steps into a ballot box, they are expressing their preferences one way or another, even if they walk in, don’t fill out any boxes, and turn it in.”

Phil Izon, who runs Alaskans for Honest Elections, the group behind Measure 2, says the ranked-choice system does more harm than good for Alaska Natives and he pointed Bolts to McCarthy’s study, saying, “The research is there but people don’t want to look at the research because it doesn’t fit their narrative.” 

Izon began organizing against ranked-choice voting after the 2022 election and drew quick support from Sarah Palin, the former Republican governor who lost the U.S. House race to Peltola in 2022. Izon, who says he has consulted for Palin in the past, also says on his website that he wants Alaska to hand count ballots, a cause some conservatives have nationwide.

Izon argues that the new voting system doesn’t help independents run for office, as they’re likely to need party support to make the top 4. He also cites a statement against ranked choice by Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation, a conservative Arizona-based organization connected to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. 

Historically, debates over ranked-choice voting did not clearly fall along partisan lines, and Democrats have also fought its implementation in some places like Washington, D.C. and Nevada. But the issue has grown increasingly partisan in recent years.

In Alaska, many Republicans turned hard against the new system after Palin’s loss to Peltola in 2022. 

Palin reacted to the result by calling ranked-choice voting “crazy, convoluted, confusing,” and her allies followed suit. Conservatives were also frustrated that the new system meant they could no longer target Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who in early 2021 voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, in a GOP primary. Murkowski was endorsed by the Alaska Federation of Natives and easily won reelection in November 2022 in the final round of ranked-choice voting; most voters who selected a Democrat as their first choice also then ranked Murkowski over her Trump-endorsed challenger.

Peltola, meanwhile, has praised ranked-choice voting and endorsed its spread to other states. “Ranked choice voting is gaining popularity because it’s giving people a better voice in their democracy,” Pelota said in 2022. “People can vote for the candidates they align with instead of being forced to vote defensively every election.” Peltola did not return a request for comment for this article. 

Besides Alaska, only Maine uses a ranked-choice voting system in statewide elections. Maine Republicans unsuccessfully tried to organize a ballot measure to repeal ranked-choice voting, and they also failed to challenge the system in court. 

Republicans in other states have also grown more aggressive in opposing ranked-choice voting in recent years. Ten GOP-leaning states have now passed laws prohibiting local governments from adopting ranked-choice voting systems, and this fall voters in Missouri will decide on a similar ban. “Missourians don’t want more voter confusion and exhaustion when they go to the ballot box than they already have,” one of that measure’s chief Republican sponsors has said. 

This fall in Alaska, Peltola is up for reelection again alongside Measure 2. In November she will face three candidates in a general election that will once again be decided by ranked-choice voting—possibly for the last time if voters approve Measure 2 on the same day.

Nelson, the co-chair of the AFN, now hopes to mobilize Native voters to reelect Peltola and halt the repeal effort. He told Bolts that the tribes in his federation will spread the word through local networks like the regional corporations that manage Native land claims.

“It’s just the whole gamut of tactics you can imagine, including social media and video ads,” he said. “It requires a lot of traveling… In our rural areas, we have to rely on locals there, even posting flyers at the local grocery and that type of thing.”

“The get out the vote effort is something we are always doing,” he continued. “But this year, there is an added urgency because of the attacks on ranked-choice voting and also because our congresswoman is up for election.”