Celebrity shouldn’t dictate election policy

In this political season there’s one place where the taint of politics must not creep — the state’s court system.

On Wednesday, the Court of Appeals granted a temporary restraining order to prevent election workers from providing a list of write-in candidates to voters at polling places. A few hours later, the Alaska Supreme Court set aside that order, and is expected to make its own ruling.

The issue stemmed from an absentee polling place in Homer, where a list of write-in candidates was posted for voters. While no one is claiming that was proper procedure, it spurred the controversy over what constitutes “assisting voters.”

According to federal law, voting officials have an obligation to provide assistance. Election workers have helped voters to the booths, accommodated disabled voters and tried to make the process voter-friendly.

According to state law, there can be no list or verbal communication of write-in candidates’ names by election workers within 200 feet of polling places. While state and federal law may seem to conflict, for the last 50 years, they haven’t.

Which makes it curious that this year they do.

No one is denying it is the write-in candidacy of U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski that has kicked up the dust. Election officials admit their concern her candidacy will prompt many to ask for help in the voting booth. Despite her many commercials to educate voters, Murkowski isn’t the easiest name to spell.

But we have a hard time believing there has never been a write-in candidate with a name more complicated than Smith or Hill in the last 50 years.

Which leaves us with the issue that the volume of people needing help spelling Murkowski is the prompt for this unprecedented assistance the Division of Elections wants to grant voters. The division wanted it badly enough to have “surreptitiously sought approval from the Department of Justice for approval under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to provide polling places with a list of write-in candidates for the Nov. 2, 2010, general election,” according to Wednesday’s state Supreme Court ruling.

And there’s the rub.

This is America, where every voter’s ballot is as important as the next voter’s. Our rights are not incumbent on the majority agreeing with us. Our right to cast a ballot cannot be overshadowed because we want to fill in the oval for the most-obscure candidate that’s ever run, or even Snoopy.

If the state Division of Election has never seen fit to help another voter in this way, it is dead wrong for the 2010 election to be any different simply because of a high-profile write-in campaign.

Any voter who wants to write in the name of Lisa Murkowski, Sid Hill or anyone else, can write the name on a piece of paper and put it in his or her pocket, draw it out in the booth, copy it on the line and fill in the oval.

If Alaska’s voting law is to change, it is incumbent on Elections to follow “the procedures of the Alaska Administrative Procedures Act, AS 44.62, by proposing a new regulation, taking public comment, and then only then changing the law.”

If it isn’t that important before the next election, we wonder why it is now.