The ACLU of Alaska’s mission is to defend our civil rights and liberties. Every year when the Alaska Legislature begins a new session, we diligently track bills that implicate Alaskans’ rights. This year, we begin that work as the second Trump administration assumes office.
We are clear-eyed about the challenges the new administration will present. And while we prepare for and respond to actions coming from Washington, what happens in Juneau will continue to have enormous impacts for Alaskans.
This year, the legislature gavels in with bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate that organized quickly after the November election around a set of priorities that include education funding, energy needs, retirement, and the state budget. As these majorities prioritize the needs of Alaskans and our state, the ACLU of Alaska will call on them to also address elections, corrections, and protections of our basic liberties.
Elections
During the last several sessions, the legislature has nearly passed an election reform package. Last year, while an elections bill was considered in the final days of session, it was clear that the way the bill came together was too divisive to succeed. This should be the session a compromise is reached and a bill gets to the governor’s desk.
The Alaska Legislature has a fundamental duty to protect our right to vote. The system has a lot of problems that can be fixed to ensure that all eligible voters are able to cast a ballot, and that every vote cast is counted. Some ways the system can be improved include:
- Establish a ballot curing system. The need for Alaska to adopt a ballot curing system was clear in 2022’s all-mail special election primary, when thousands of ballots were rejected because of easily fixable errors, like lacking a voter identifier or signature of the voter. In this November’s election, while the rate of rejections decreased, more than 1,300 absentee ballots were again thrown out. Many of those ballots could have counted. In a state with many close candidate and ballot initiative races, the ability to “cure” problems with your ballot is integral to ensure that results reflect the will of the voters.
- Remove the witness signature requirement from Alaska’s absentee voting law. In this last election, the witness signature requirement was again the single biggest reason why absentee ballots were rejected – a tragic outcome given that the requirement doesn’t do anything productive. In a 2020 lawsuit over this same requirement, the state couldn’t produce a single example of the requirement preventing fraud.
- Legislative oversight into other longstanding issues that impact elections, including poll worker recruitment and retention, U.S. Postal Service failures, and the state’s language assistance program, which currently lacks staff. Legislative oversight provides critical opportunities to show that additional policy or budgetary provisions are needed to improve the way Alaska administers elections, from registration to the ballot box.
Corrections
We continue to prioritize our work to uphold the constitutional rights and dignity of people incarcerated in Alaska’s prisons and involved in the criminal legal system. This work is directly tied to the state’s budget, as we have witnessed dramatic rises in the Department of Corrections (DOC) budget during the Dunleavy Administration.
Governor Dunleavy proposes to allocate more than $480 million for DOC, about a 7% increase from what he originally proposed for the last fiscal year. Four years ago, it was news when the proposed DOC budget eclipsed that of the university system – at the time, the figure wasn’t even $350 million. As DOC’s budget creeps close to half a billion dollars, it’s worth asking what Alaska is getting for that money, and if it could invest the money in better ways.
Even with these annual budget increases, we continue to see a host of problems related to conditions of confinement, including the overuse of solitary confinement. Substance use and mental health programming at the state’s only maximum-security facility is lacking, which creates dangerous conditions during incarceration and increased chances of recidivism when people are released. DOC continues to lack transparency with respect to deaths in custody – including to families of people who have died. The department’s inadequate efforts to reduce sexual violence in Alaska’s jails and prisons is putting the state at risk of losing federal funds.
Increasing DOC’s budget does not make us safer. DOC was never designed to solve complex behavioral and mental health problems, addressing pervasive histories of sexual abuse and trauma, and providing elder-life care. By the time people end up in prison, we have missed so many opportunities to invest in our people and communities in ways that could prevent incarceration or recidivism. Instead, we should invest in education, community-based treatment options, housing, and other basic needs that are critical to our public safety.
Free speech and LGBTQIA2S+ rights
We are hoping that the legislature gives no air time to policy that would imperil our free speech rights and target LGBTQ+ Alaskans.
In the last legislature, lawmakers devoted almost a dozen hearings to the governor’s proposed legislation that would crack down on Alaskans’ ability to protest and freely assemble in public places. The House also spent valuable time and energy on cruel bills targeting transgender and non-binary youth.
While none of these bills passed, they stoked fear and division in our communities and distracted us from other pressing issues such as funding education, improving public safety, ensuring voting rights and protecting free speech and privacy rights. Rather than authorizing our government to invade the privacy of children and dictate the kinds of health care Alaskans can access, we should hold our elected officials to abide by their oath to protect our rights to be free from governmental interference and uphold the principles of equal justice under the law, due process, and access to our democracy.
We know that our state is a firewall for freedom to push back against federal policies that threaten the values of what it means to be an Alaskan. We encourage you to take action, engage with your elected officials, speak up for the things you care about, and to stay connected to organizations that are working to defend your rights in Juneau this spring.
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