Assembly declines to move election date

PALMER — Despite efforts to consolidate them with state elections, Mat-Su Borough elections will continue to be in October, at least for now.

At a meeting of the Mat-Su Borough Assembly Tuesday, members discussed a change Assemblyman Steve Colligan proposed to a set of changes tidying up the election rules.

Colligan’s change would have swapped out just one word in the code. But changing “October” to “November” meant a whole lot of things to a whole lot of clerks.

Palmer City Clerk Janette Bower told the assembly that the city works with the borough on elections. Moving borough elections would probably also move city elections. Palmer can’t change its date without a vote of the people, though.

Also, voting the same night as the state would mean the borough and cities wouldn’t be able to use the state’s vote counting machines until very late in the evening. The borough would go first, then the cities.

“Probably the cities would be getting our election results about 10 or 11,” Bower said. “It’s probably not a good idea to be counting ballots at that time of night. The error rate would be a little higher than normal.”

Wasilla City Clerk Kristie Smithers said it would be impossible to change that date for this year’s election. Her city has already started receiving absentee ballots and already advertised the election to the public.

She also brought up the issue of polling place workers. The same group of people tend to work at polling places for the borough and the state. They couldn’t work for both at the same time.

“That would mean that the borough clerk would have possibly a hard time getting experienced election officials,” Smithers said.

Borough Clerk Lonnie McKechnie said this was actually the piece of the date change that worries her the most.

“You really want experienced people in your precincts,” she said. And new people don’t volunteer for those jobs very often. Even if they do, McKechnie said, “I would say it takes maybe five years for an election official to truly know what is going on in their precinct.”

As for the assembly, opinion was mixed.

Colligan, of course, was for it. He noted that turnout at borough elections is between 15 and 20 percent, but in statewide elections turnout is usually more on the order of 50 percent. In years where there’s also a presidential election, that bumps up to 60 percent.

Darcie Salmon said he prefers to keep elections separate, and he didn’t find that argument about turnout compelling.

“I think that’s a horrible state of affairs that we should impose our will as a body to increase voter turnout,” Salmon said. “The voters know. They don’t come because they don’t want to.”

Assemblyman Warren Keogh offered a comparison. The only other borough he could find that does it the proposed way is the Denali Borough.

“It’s a significant difference on a matter of scale,” Keogh said. The Denali Borough has just five polling places. “They do have a very high voter turnout, but it seems like more of a cultural thing.”

In the end, Colligan decided to withdraw his change. The unedited raft of clerk-proposed rule changes passed without discussion.

“I think it best that I withdraw my motion and bring it back as another ordinance or as a ballot initiative,” Colligan said of his decision to drop the matter.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.