A Native-led voter mobilization group is working to boost Alaska Native voter education and turnout this election season.
Get Out the Native Vote is a nonpartisan effort now underway to reach voters across the state’s vast and varied geography and get them to cast ballots in the primary election on Aug. 18 and the general election on Nov. 3.
Alaska Native voters make up roughly one in four Alaska voters, said Michelle Sparck, director of the initiative, who is Cup’ik from the Southwest village of Chevak.
She said part of voter education is raising awareness of when Alaska Native voters came out in force and reached a peak voter turnout of 66% in 1982. Some regions had nearly 80% voter turnout, Sparck said. That’s when decisions on subsistence policy, abortion and moving the State Capitol from Juneau were on the ballot.
“I call it the birth of the Alaska Native super voter. That generation made it a cultural value,” she said. “With that political capital that the 1980s generation built, they were able to own their sovereignty and self-determination tools.”
But voter turnout has declined significantly in the decades since. In the 2024 election, 30% of Alaska Native voters cast their ballots.
The mission of the campaign is to turn that decline around and reach historic highs again.
“This is what we’re capable of, and this is what this is our potential, and I’m so excited to hold the mirror up to the communities because a lot of them really just had no idea what their performance is over the last, you know, 40-some years,” Sparck said.
Get Out the Native Vote is supported by a partnership between the Alaska Federation of Natives, First Nations Institute and Cook Inlet Tribal Council with some funding from private foundations and the Carter Center, which was founded by former President Jimmy Carter.
The campaign is collaborating with local, state and tribal governments; regional Native corporations, organizations and service providers; schools; prisons and community groups to host voter education and outreach events around the state.
The Aug. 18 primary falls within the summer subsistence fishing season, which is challenging for many people to find time to vote, Sparck said, but she’s found a helpful analogy.
Spark said 131 voting precincts in the state, more than a quarter, rely entirely on the U.S. Postal Service and air carriers to receive and mail their ballots.
Get Out the Native Vote is working to make sure post offices are staffed and helping the Alaska Division of Elections to recruit staff and volunteers so that each precinct has elections workers, bilingual poll workers and outreach workers to help with Native language translations.
Sparck is also finding youth volunteers for a “Youth at the Booth” program, whose goal is to have teenage volunteers assist at polling places and learn about elections in the process.
Particularly in the Arctic, the initiative is partnering with the North Slope Borough and community leaders to make sure all precincts are staffed and open, in hopes of avoiding repeats of past election years where rural residents could not vote due to issues with staffing poll workers.
In 2024, polling stations in rural villages of Wales and Kaktovik never opened. In Northwest and Western Alaska, voting hours were reduced in Marshall, Shaktoolik, Diomede and Kobuk. Primary ballots arrived late in at least 14 other Native villages.
Alaska Native communities have also had the highest rates of rejected ballots, according to the Alaska Federation of Natives. One of the main issues is an incomplete witness signature on the mail-in ballot. In 2022, one in eight rural mail-in ballots were rejected, totaling more than 7,500 ballots rejected from rural Alaska.
A bipartisan elections bill that would have removed the witness signature requirement, among many other measures aimed at improving voting access, passed the State Legislature this year, but Gov. Mike Dunleavy vetoed the bill.
The Alaska Beacon is an independent, donor-funded news organization. Alaskabeacon.com.
