For about 20 years, Thomas Evans helped set up the voting booths in the community center in Nanwalek, Alaska, and checked in his neighbors as they came through the door. In those years, the 1980s and '90s, he remembers most of the village turning out. Now, he said, there is no regular precinct polling place in the village on Election Day.
"There's no polling place anymore," Evans told Newsweek. It has "really kind of handicapped our village, not being able to turn in a reliable count for who the people want." Nanwalek is one of at least 18 rural Alaska communities named in a lawsuit filed Thursday that accuses the state of advertising in-person voting sites that then failed to open. Most are Alaska Native villages reachable only by plane or boat.
The case reaches a courtroom Monday morning, less than 24 hours before polls open in a U.S. Senate race that polls show is within a point or two. The state’s website lists Nanwalek’s absentee in-person site as open since Oct. 19, when in-person voting began.
But the lawsuit says the site was not operating that week, and a crowd-sourced tracker paid for by the 907 Initiative, a political group, reports that it did not open until Oct. 30. Asked directly when the site opened, a Division of Elections spokesperson referred Newsweek to its same website listing. Newsweek could not independently confirm when the site opened.
If the lawsuit and the tracker are correct, Nanwalek voters had no place in the village to vote in person for the first 11 days of early voting. The suit, Midnight Sun Independence Fund v. Dahlstrom, was filed Oct. 29 in Anchorage Superior Court against Lt.
Nancy Dahlstrom, Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher, and the division itself. It argues that closing advertised sites without notice violates the right to vote and the guarantee of due process in the Alaska Constitution. It asks the court to order every listed site opened.
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