June, Alaska — The small Alaska Native village of Beaver is about a 40-minute flight from the nearest town. Its roughly 50 residents rely on weekday flights for mail and many of their basic needs, from groceries to Amazon deliveries for everyday household items.
Air service plays a large role in the nation’s most expansive state, with most communities relying on flights for year-round access. Airplanes also play a critical role in elections, transporting voting materials and ballots to and from rural areas like Beaver, and in delivering ballots to thousands of Alaskans who vote by mail — some in places where in-person voting is not available.
The vast distances and relative isolation of many communities make Alaska unique, which is why its residents are so interested in Monday’s arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Many here are worried about that A case from Mississippi Challenging whether ballots received after Election Day can be counted in federal elections could end Alaska’s practice of accepting late ballots. Alaska counts ballots if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within 10 days, or 15 days for foreign voters in general elections.
“These processes have been in place for a long time just to ensure that our votes are counted,” said Rhonda Petka, a poll worker and first chair in Beaver, which lies along the Yukon River 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Fairbanks.
If the court decides that ballots must be received in all states by Election Day, she said, “they will disenfranchise thousands of people — thousands of people in these rural communities. It just means their votes don’t count, and that’s a real shame.”
Alaska One of 14 states That allows all mail-in ballots mailed and postmarked by Election Day to arrive days or weeks later and be counted, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Voting Rights Lab. An additional 15 provide grace periods for military and foreign voting.
but Alaska geography, weather and great distances Among communities — Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas, the nation’s second-largest state — raising the stakes for voters. The unusual way the state counts its votes also makes the grace period important, advocates say.
Under Alaska’s ranked choice system in general elections, workers in small rural election districts call voters’ first picks to the regional elections office. However, all ballots are eventually transported to the state elections division in the capital, Juneau. There, races that are not won live are tabulated to determine the winner.
Even with Alaska’s current 10-day grace period, ballots from some villages in 2022 were not fully counted due to mail delays. They arrived too late for tabulations in Juneau, 15 days after Election Day.
If the Supreme Court rules that ballots cannot be counted if they arrive at election offices after Election Day, dozens of voters in Alaska could be affected. About 50,000 Alaskans voted by mail in the 2024 presidential election.
“I think there is probably no other state where this ruling could have a more damaging impact than we have,” Alaska Republican Rep. Lisa Murkowski said in an interview.
Murkowski sees the issue – A challenge By the Republican National Committee and others to Mississippi allowing ballots to arrive late – as an attempt to End voting by mail At the national level.
The Republican National Committee argues that these grace periods improperly extend elections for federal offices, but Mississippi has countered that voting is not conducted after Election Day — only the delivery and counting of already completed ballots.
The Supreme Court will hear the arguments, as will the US Senate Discussing legislation President Donald Trump is pushing her to do so It will require People must provide proof of citizenship to register to vote and a photo ID to cast a ballot.
Combined, such efforts could discourage people from voting, Murkowski said.
“I think we’re seeing a level of voter intimidation, I’ll just say that,” she said. “I feel strongly that the effort we should be making at the federal level is to do everything we can to make our elections accessible, fair and transparent for every legal voter out there.”
Alaska’s other members of Congress, Rep. Nick Begich and Sen. Dan Sullivan, both Republican allies of Trump and seeking re-election this year, support the Save America Act now before the Senate. But they also said they want to make sure votes are counted correctly on or before Election Day.
“We’ll see what the courts choose to do on this issue, but I think we need to allow time for ballots to arrive from rural areas of our state,” Begich said during a recent visit to Juneau.
Alaska Attorney General Stephen Cox and Solicitor General Gina Lawrence did not take sides in a lawsuit in the Mississippi case, but made clear Geographic and logistical challenges To hold elections in Alaska.
In Atkasuk, on Alaska’s North Slope, poll workers counted votes on election night in 2024, numbers they typically send over the phone to election department officials. But they couldn’t get through and “chose what they saw as the next best solution — putting the ballots and tally papers in a secure package and mailing them to the department, which did not receive them until nine days later,” the filing said.
The filing seeks clarification from the Supreme Court, particularly regarding what it means to receive ballots by Election Day.
While it is clear when a ballot is cast, “when certain ballots are actually ‘received’ is open to various interpretations, especially in light of the connectivity challenges faced by Alaska’s remote neighborhoods,” Cox and Lawrence wrote.
Limited postal service in rural areas means some ballots may not be postmarked until they arrive in Anchorage or Juneau, which could take days, lawyers from the Native American Rights Fund and the Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center said in their court filings.
In the 2022 general election, between 55% and 78% of absentee ballots from state House districts stretching from the Aleutian Islands to the West Coast to the vast North Slope arrived at the elections office after Election Day, they wrote. Statewide, about 20% of all absentee ballots in those elections were received after Election Day.
They warned that requiring ballots to be received by Election Day would “disproportionately disenfranchise Alaska Native voters.” The attorneys represent the National Congress of American Indians, Native Vote Washington, and the Alaska Federation of Natives.
Michelle Spark, director of Get Out the Native Vote, a nonpartisan voting rights advocacy group affiliated with the Alaska Federation of Natives, is concerned about creating confusion and fear among voters.
She sees the case before the Supreme Court and the Republican SAVE Act as a “multi-pronged attempt to control or wrest control of elections away from the states.” Alaska already has enough ingrained barriers for many voters, she said.
“There is a rigorous record of election fraud — not at a rate that requires this aggressive response through the Legislature and the Supreme Court,” she said.