Platinum, on the Bering Sea coast, is a small town — it has fewer than 50 residents. But when it comes to local elections, administrators make sure that traveling even small distances within town doesn’t get in the way of voting.
“We'll go to elderly homes and present the ballots, because they, hard to get around for them,” explained Lou Adams, the acting tribal administrator for Platinum Village Traditional Council. She said that organizers present ballots in English and Yup’ik to make voting materials accessible to everyone.
According to Adams, almost everyone votes. But it was a different story when it came to the last general election.
“There was hardly any involvement because of the ballots came in really late,” Adams said.
Adams said that all of Platinum’s residents have to vote absentee by mail because the village is too small to have a polling place. Over 4,000 Alaskans vote this way, living in what the Alaska Division of Elections designates as Permanent Absentee Jurisdictions.
In Platinum, voting by mail can be tricky. The village doesn’t have its own post office. To get their mail into or out of town, the community dispatches people in pairs by snowmachine or boat to the neighboring community of Goodnews Bay.
“When it's frozen, we have to either take the mountain trail or the coast trail, depending on the ice situations,” Adams explained.
If the weather is bad, or the bay is half-frozen, residents can go weeks without mail.
“The longest is about maybe almost two months,” Adams said. “Because if it's not freezing right, and it doesn't freeze right away and it takes longer, so we have to wait on that.”
A 'no excuse' voting state
People across Alaska vote by mail for all kinds of reasons. Some because of disability, or because of the lack of in-person voting opportunity. Others might just want to, or they might find in-person voting unreliable due to low staffing. In the last general election, over 70,000 Alaskans voted absentee by mail. And in November, when the general election happens, weather can create all kinds of delays.
Richard Moses is an Alaska-based campaign and election lawyer. He’s represented parties involved in ballot recounts and has seen the late arrivals firsthand.
“One of them was from out in Western Alaska. It was postmarked prior to Election Day, and still arrived like, it was seven or eight days after the deadline,” Moses said.
For Alaska voters residing inside the United States, the state allows mail-in ballots to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day and arrive no later than 10 days after a general election.
But a U.S. Supreme Court decision could change that. The court is currently considering a Republican Party challenge to a Mississippi law that counts mail-in ballots similarly to how Alaska does. In their court brief, Republican party lawyers said that delayed counting violates federal law that nationally sets an election day.
Alaska’s attorney general filed a brief with the court that did not take a side, but did explain the challenges Alaskans face when voting.
Moses, who has represented both Democrats and Republicans, said that it could affect Alaska significantly if the state's law were to be struck down.
“We live in a state where diphtheria serum had to be delivered 1,000 miles on a dog sled, not that long ago, actually, and so any change to the electoral process in any way is going to be groundbreaking here,” Moses said.
'It’s not good to mess with these things'
Michelle Sparck runs the non-partisan effort "Get Out the Native Vote." It operates under the Alaska Federation of Natives, which filed an amicus brief in the aforementioned case. The brief said that discounting late-arriving ballots would disenfranchise many Native voters, in Alaska and other places, who are often in remote communities.
“It's not good to mess with these things, especially during an election year,” Sparck said.
Under the proposed change, voters could still still vote by mail, they would just have to send their ballots in earlier. In Alaska’s rural areas, voters can request their ballots 45 days early. But Sparck pressed that a lot can change in the weeks before an election.
“When everybody has the luxury until 8 p.m. on Election Day to make their decisions, it's not fair to put the burden on us to vote as soon as possible,” Sparck said.
If a change went into effect before this November, Alaska political watchers say that it could affect the consequential senate race between Democrat Mary Peltola and Republican Dan Sullivan.
Peltola faces headwinds in a state that went to President Donald Trump by 13 points in the last election. Analysts say many of Peltola's supporters live in rural areas that could be impacted by a mail-in voting change.
In Platinum, where Adams said that a change could be detrimental when paired with the community’s inconsistent mail, counting late-arriving ballots is about more than just election outcomes. It’s about the principle of having a vote.
“It's kind of disheartening,” Adams said. “You want your, your vote to be counted. That's why you vote, so you can maybe make a difference.”
Adams said that the community is hoping to get a polling place. Until then, voting will continue to rely on boats, snowmachines, and bush planes.
