US House hopeful pleads for ballot reprint from Alaska court

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An attorney told the Alaska Supreme Court on Friday that 800,000 ballots must be reprinted to avoid a “hanging chad” situation after the state changed the ballot design.

Anchorage attorney Kevin Feldis, representing U.S. House candidate Alyse Galvin, appealed a lower court ruling earlier Friday in which the judge said Galvin’s arguments had valor but she sided with the state that harm that would be done to the state in reprinting ballots.

The state, under Republican-appointed Elections Director Gail Fenumiai, changed the ballot this year to remove party affiliation and instead only lists how people got to the ballot.

For Galvin, she is a nonpartisan candidate who ran and won the Democratic primary for U.S. House, as she did in 2018, the year the Democrats opened their primaries.

That year, she was listed on the with a U behind her name, when she was registered undeclared, but on this year’s general election ballot, she’s listed as “Democratic nominee.” She later changed her party affiliation to nonpartisan.

She sued to seek to have the ballots reprinted with an N for nonpartisan behind her name, saying her independence is a defining characteristic for her.

“In this political climate, we know that the major parties, the Republicans and Democrats, are trying to align the unaffiliated voters with those opposition parties,“ Feldis said, noting there is an ad on a city bus in Anchorage that tries to align Galvin with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat. “You know what? This ballot does exactly that.”

He said the changes made by the Division of Elections are both unconstitutional and are in violation of state law.

“Both Gavin’s statutory and her constitutional claim are wrong on the merits,” countered Alaska Assistant Attorney General Laura Fox.

“But the more pressing issue right now is that even assuming her claims had merit, the remedies she seeks is drastically out of proportion to any small harm she might suffer from not having her voter registration printed on the ballot,” she said.

Such mitigating remedies mentioned could include providing informational flyers describing the party affiliation for Galvin and others mailed with absentee ballots, or handing out the fliers or posting signs at polling places.

Feldis rejected those options, saying they are fraught with many possibilities of error.

Instead, he said the only good option is reprinting the ballots, despite the state’s predictions of it possibly delaying the election.

“The state has used lots of lots of words like debacle, chaos, derailment, disaster that they allege we’ve created but that’s of their own making to the extent any of that exists,” he said, adding the problem is the state's own making.

“The cleanest path here is to reprint the ballots so we avoid adding another element here, another hanging chad, into this election.”

The state received the ballots Sept. 10 from a contracted printer in Homer. The changes only became known when a sample ballot was posted this week on the division's website.

Time, supplies and equipment seem to be biggest stumbling blocks to reprinting the ballots.

Getting the proper paper to the printer would be one of the holdups. Fenumiaia testified during the earlier hearing that the contractor has enough paper on hand to reprint 390,000 ballots. To finish the printing run, he would have to secure a shipment of additional printing paper from the Lower 48. The printer has a hold on a supply now, but it would be delivered until the end of the month. The hold for that supply expired Friday.

Fox said there are other issues involved with reprinting the ballots, including having voting machines statewide shipped back to Juneau for reprogramming.

The state also face a Friday afternoon deadline to get about 8,000 overseas ballots in the mail. There was no immediate decision from the Alaska Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, and the deadline to deliver the ballots to the post office expired.

It wasn’t immediately clear what election officials decided about those ballots, but they had been in touch with Department of Justice officials to see if they could extend the federal deadline to mail the overseas ballots.