Polls are set to open in the village of Kipnuk on Tuesday for the first time since the remnants of Typhoon Halong ravaged Western Alaska villages last fall.
Most residents of Kipnuk and nearby Kwigillingok were evacuated in the days after the storm amid widespread devastation. Polling places in the two villages never opened for the August primary.
And turnout, predictably, fell off a cliff, said Michelle Sparck with the nonpartisan group Get Out The Native Vote. Just a handful of residents were able to cast ballots, she said, a 90% drop from turnout two years earlier.
More than 500 people are registered to vote in Kipnuk and Kwigillingok. And while hundreds of the villages’ former residents are scattered across the state, including many in Anchorage, a significant number remain.
Estimates vary widely, but “there's between 150 and 250 people living in Kipnuk,” Sparck said. “Some of those are permanent residents that never wanted to leave in the first place, or they had salvageable housing, and then a large part of that is a workforce.”
So Sparck and other voting-access groups have been working with the Division of Elections to set up in-person absentee voting in the two communities.
The division declined an interview request, but Sparck said state officials have been receptive to designating the two villages as so-called “permanent absentee voting” sites. The Lower Kuskokwim School District agreed to allow Kipnuk’s Chief Paul Memorial School to be used as a polling place. Community members found a volunteer willing to staff the voting site.
And now, polls are set to open in Kipnuk. Starting Tuesday, Oct. 27, polls will open to voters for four hours each weekday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., through Election Day, the Division of Elections announced Thursday.
Sparck said she and others are still pushing to open a polling site in Kwigillingok, where far fewer people remain. For the moment, she said, the only holdup was finding someone willing to manage the polls.
“All it takes is a willing person, and that person can make a huge difference for their village, for their community, for their region, for their culture, for their people, their languages,” Sparck said.
That’s true beyond the storm-damaged villages, she said. Across rural Alaska, unexpected challenges that threaten voters’ ability to cast ballots come up all the time, she said.
Residents throughout rural Alaska should reach out to Get Out The Native Vote or the Alaska Federation of Natives as they build a roster of people willing to pitch in at the polls, Sparck said.
