Political wrangling keeps primary voters guessing

Frontiersman editorial board

The state's primary election ballot structure hasn't been exactly easy to decipher over the last decade, mostly because of Alaska political parties' desire to use or prevent the use of their party's ballot as a tool to influence election outcomes.

Using every step in the election process to your advantage is something common to political parties, and that drive has often led to unbelievably complex solutions to seemingly simple problems. Hopefully, voters will find this ballot more to their liking.

The state's first Legislature, in 1960, enacted the single-ballot open primary. Voters were given a single ballot, listing candidates from both major parties. Voters marked a box indicating which party they were voting for. In 1967, the Legislature shifted back to the blanket primary in place prior to statehood.

That method stood for 25 years. Then, Alaska's political parties got involved.

The Republican Party of Alaska, in 1992, challenged the constitutionality of the blanket primary system, holding that the blanket primary infringed on a party's right of free association. The state and the Republican party reached an agreement that allowed for a party-rule ballot containing the names of candidates who filed as Republicans, and were made available to Republican, nonpartisan and undeclared voters.

A second ballot, containing the names of the candidates of all the other political parties was made available to all voters, and voters could choose only one ballot. This arrangement stuck until 1996, when the Alaska Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the blanket primary was decided and the blanket primary was reinstated.

In June 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court decided California's blanket primary -- similar to Alaska's -- was unconstitutional and did, in fact, violate the First Amendment. The court said political parties have the right to offer voting to self-identified members, and not to the general electorate. In response, Alaska drafted emergency regulations that allowed the 2000 primary election to be conducted as a party-rule ballot.

A bill passed the Legislature in 2001 that set out a primary ballot for each political party. That led to perhaps the state's most confusing primary election, in which voters were asked to choose from six ballots, and voters who had declared affiliation with a political party could only choose candidates from that party, while undeclared and nonpartisan voters could choose one ballot from the six.

The Alaska primary has now come full circle, and voters can choose a combined third-party ballot, a combined ballot that also includes Democratic candidates, or a ballot that only lists Republican candidates. More party maneuvering followed -- the Alaska Democratic Party was open to including anyone who included them on their "can-vote" list, meaning while Republicans can choose the straight combined ballot, they cannot choose the Democratic ballot.

It's no wonder the primary-election turnouts are so low -- voters in Alaska have to contend with learning a new process and picking a new ballot each year. For families who are already overtaxed for time, the election process should be kept simple, painless and, perhaps most of all, stable.