Petitioners submitted thousands of signatures to the Division of Elections on Thursday backing an effort to register residents to vote at the same time they sign up for their annual Permanent Fund dividends.
The campaign began late last year in Anchorage and snowballed to other communities, including Sitka, Ketchikan, Kotzebue, Bethel and Fairbanks. The PFD voter ballot initiative supporters collected some 42,000 signatures. Some petitioners will be invalidated, but that’s nearly double what’s needed to make it on a ballot.
“We’re confident that by overshooting the required mark by so much we’re going to make it onto the ballot,” said John-Henry Heckendorn, the Anchorage-based campaign manager of the initiative.
After the Division of Elections combs through all the signatures, the proposal will likely show up on the August primary or November general election ballot.
Heckendorn said the “common sense” initiative was born out of a working group on elections reform, organized by Lt. Gov. Byron Mallot, and gained support across party lines.
A broad spectrum of agencies, including the NAACP, the League of Women voters and the Alaska Federation of Natives endorsed the initiative. The majority of the campaign’s funding has come from the ANCSA Regional Association, Alaska Conservation Voters and the ACLU of Alaska.
Heckendorn said the group’s main arguments for merging voter registration with PFD applications is to make it easier for people to vote and to reduce redundancies and paperwork.
To be eligible to vote in an election, residents must be registered for at least 30 days.
“This initiative is a move towards using resources we already invested in to do double or even triple duty,” he said. “Alaska has one of the lower rates of active voter registration in the U.S. This initiative would make Alaska’s voting system the most accurate voting system of any state in U.S. history and that’s huge.”
The working group, which included Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, modeled their initiative after Oregon’s Motor Voter Law, which ties voter registration to driver’s license applications and renewals and state IDs.
Zoe Kitchel, Sitka’s field organizer for the campaign, says Kreiss-Tomkins was instrumental in garnering support.
“He himself was out there at the Star Wars premiere collecting signatures and running around frantically helping the effort the last two weeks of December,” Kitchel said.
At the state level, the Division of Elections recently launched an online form. Since November, according to Lt. Gov. Mallot, some 600 people have signed up to vote. That’s an improvement, Kitchel said, but not enough.
“There’s still that limiting factor that you’re really excited to vote, and you go to register to vote online 25 days before the election, and that’s still not soon enough even though it’s online,” she said. “By automatically registering people, they don’t have to worry about that 30 day restriction and it just takes another step out of the way.”
Last year, more than half a million Alaskans received PFD checks. If this ballot initiative passes, the Division of Elections estimates 70,000 more people could simultaneously be registered to vote, Kitchel said.
“We’re trying to change voting from an opt-in system to an opt-out system,” she said.
Some opponents of the initiative fear giving too much personal information to the government. Kitchel said the proposal would collect no more more information than the PFD application. The initiative also includes an an opt-out clause. Within a month of applying for the PFD, residents will be mailed a postcard offering deregistration.
