Senator Mike Shower, who represents Mat-Su, Delta Junction, Copper River Valley, Talkeetna, and Valdez, has been discussing his bill that aims to weaken vote-by-mail systems used by some cities across Alaska, including Anchorage. He claims that it aims to strengthen voter integrity, while critics have said that weakening vote-by-mail systems is a means of voter suppression.
Senator Shower spoke to KSRM’s Sound Off Tuesday morning, where he said that this effort began long before the popular cries of voter fraud in the 2020 election among conservatives: “We filed this bill over two years ago! It’s something we’ve been working on for three years as an office because we saw certain things that we could probably do better about chain-of-custody, about the election integrity, to make sure that it’s one-person one-vote, so we’ve been working on this for years. What’s happened with this bill, which we already had a bill filed for years now, but never got hearings on it, including working with the Lt. Governor’s office because that’s his primary responsibility is elections, is that we’ve seen so many irregularities this last election cycle that we’ve added a few provisions to the bill just to try to make it stronger.”
He added: “I also operate on the principle that everything should be on the table, nothing is sacred, so let’s talk about it, let’s get these thins out there. Ultimately, what it really comes down to is that it is about election integrity. That’s all it is! As I said, it’s about chain-of-custody, it’s about trying to prevent fraud, it’s about trying to get citizens involved like with a hotline, so that’s what this is. Period. Nothing else.”
He also noted that the bill does not prevent people from registering to vote with their PFD application; rather, it forces people to manually opt-in on their application rather than it being an automatic trigger.
The Anchorage Daily News quoted Democratic Senator Scott Kawasaki saying that there are more sinister goals behind this effort: “They’re going to say this is an election-reform bill, but this is a voter suppression bill, plain and simple. People are going to be less able to vote, less likely to get a ballot, and it disenfranchises a whole section of folks that were able to benefit this last year.”