Assembly takes aim at voter turnout

We hope the Valley will join us in keeping an eye on a proposed change in election rules that sparked debate last week around the Mat-Su Borough Assembly table.

Assemblyman Steve Colligan, perhaps prompted by a pretty common question regular voters have — why do the Mat-Su Borough and state vote on two different days — sought to move borough elections to the same day as state elections. Like a lot of things in local government, this one seems at first like a no-brainer, but on further examination gets really complicated really fast.

The person in charge of elections there, Mat-Su Borough Clerk Lonnie McKechnie, as usual stayed out of debates around the table. But she gave the assembly a sense of what this would mean for her office.

First, it would mean either that election returns would come in quite a bit later than we’re used to or that the borough would have to pay some up-front costs.

That’s because the borough uses the state’s vote counters. If the election date was moved, the borough would either have to wait in line or buy its own counters. A third possibility — hand-counting ballots — would entail a lot more manpower and would also be expensive.

Secondly, she said, it would mean she would be in competition for poll workers with the state. Right now, the same people who run state elections also usually turn out on borough election night.

The state, however, is not interested in running the borough’s election. That means separate ballots, which means separate ballot distributors, which means two tables at each polling place and two ballots for voters to mark.

In advocating for the change, Colligan pointed to statistics.

Borough and city elections tend to bring out something on the order of 20 percent of registered voters on a good day. State elections bring out 50 percent, 60 percent in years when there’s also a presidential election.

It would stand to reason, then, that by swallowing that up-front cost and maybe settling for less-experienced poll workers, the borough could double or even triple its turnout.

If the borough made this change, it would join a small group of Alaska communities that vote on the same day as the state. Assemblyman Warren Keogh said he could only find one borough in Alaska that does it that way.

There’s probably a reason for that. We would suspect that the logistics are tangled and the costs too high.

We love the idea of higher voter turnout to the polls. We’ve been vocal critics of our abysmal voter turnout numbers in the past and if there were a viable solution to increase turnout, we’d advocate investing public money to do so.

But first we’d like to know more about how much money it might cost and what the change would mean for other cities within the borough that hold their own elections?

It’s an exciting prospect, one worth keeping a sharp eye on.