Campaign to boost Native voting combats both apathy and logistical challenges

Michelle Sparck, director of Get Out The Native Vote, stands by her business’ booth on Saturday at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage. Sparck, wearing a button identifying her as a Cup’ik voter, is urging Alaska Natives to be more diligent about voting in both state and local elections. In addition to her voter-education work, Sparck has a beauty-products business, ArXotica, that she and her sisters founded. (Photo by Yereth Rosen/Alaska Beacon)

Four decades ago, in days before the internet and automatic voter registration, Alaska Natives turned out to vote at high levels.

That participation has eroded badly, a situation that should be reversed, said Michelle Sparck, director of an Alaska nonpartisan organization called Get Out The Native Vote.

Alaska Natives are not fully realizing their power if they do not vote, she said.

“They say that anytime you look at a white male in this country, you know they’re a voter. We should be in that kind of category,” Sparck said in a presentation Friday at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Anchorage.

Alaska Natives represent up to a quarter of the state population, she said. “If we start to vote at our power, if we start to vote at our population, we are a formidable group,” she said.

Overall Native turnout was 66% in 1982, a year when a measure affecting subsistence was on the statewide ballot, according to her calculations. By 2022, it had dropped to about 28%, she said.

Sparck, who is Cup’ik and has roots in the Southwest Alaska village of Chevak, flipped through a series of graphs that showed declining voter participation in every region, from a high of 78.6% in 1982 in the Northwest Arctic, the “rock star” for voting, to 2022 levels around the state that are mired between about 20% and about 30%. Turnout in this year’s primary election was much lower, down to single digits percentages in two regions, her data showed.

“We need to turn these graphs around,” she told the audience.

In formal presentations like Sparck’s, at informational booths lining the convention center rooms and in face-to-face conversations, speakers urged Alaska Natives to step up their voting turnout.

Among those making the plea was Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

“I’m not going to tell you how to vote in a couple of weeks. That is your decision, your prerogative. But I am going to ask you: Please vote. Do vote. Because the process needs you. It needs each and every one of you. Whether you’re from a small village or an urban area, your voice matters,” Murkowski said in her Saturday speech to the convention.

And she referred to her 2010 reelection, in which she beat a more conservative GOP nominee through a historic write-in campaign mobilized by Alaska Native leaders. 

“Collectively your voices become stronger, and you know, because you’ve demonstrated it. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it,” she said.

For advocates trying to boost Native turnout, accomplishing the goal is not always as simple as generating interest.

The get-out-the-vote campaigners are challenged by more than voter apathy. There are logistical obstacles that make it more difficult for residents of largely Native rural areas to either cast their votes or have those votes counted.

In recent elections, several precincts in rural districts have failed to open or opened late. In this year’s primary election and in 2022, the problem appeared to have been caused by lack of precinct workers.

“I don’t know how any community would accept the fact that their polls don’t open until 10, or they’re closed during lunch, or they close early, or they don’t open until 7:30 (p.m.) on Election Day,” Sparck said in an interview.

Voting by mail is unreliable, too, she said. Rural voters cannot rely on the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mailed-in ballots on time because so many post offices are understaffed and unable to fully function, she said.

A helpful move would be to have a precinct or drop box at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium campus to accommodate confined hospital patients and others at the medical sites, Sparck said. But the state Division of Elections rejected her request.

The response to the request from the division, she said, was that an ANTHC polling site was not needed because one would be available at the University of Alaska Anchorage campus adjacent to the medical campus. “I said, ‘You might as well be a plane ride away, because that is not a convenience whatsoever to people on the campus,’” Sparck said.

Asked about Sparck’s request, Michaela Thompson, operations manager of the Division of Elections, said the state does not use drop boxes but that ballots may be dropped at any division office or early or absentee in-person voting location.

As for securing poll workers, the division is doing a good job of recruitment overall, she said. “There are areas in the state that we historically have challenges recruiting workers and additionally workers who can no longer work and we need to find replacements for their positions. However, our offices have been working diligently to fill any open positions as they occur,” she said by email.

Sparck and others said that a particularly consequential barrier for Native voters in rural areas is a state requirement that mail-in ballots bear witness signatures. A lawsuit filed on behalf of Native voters resulted in that requirement being waived in 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the requirement returned in 2022, in a special election that year, about one in eight rural mail-in votes wound up rejected.

A bill that the bipartisan-majority state Senate passed early this year would have removed that witness-signature requirement, but it failed to advance in the Republican-controlled House.

Sparck said she believes that is an example of deliberate Native disenfranchisement.

Recent comments by House Speaker Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, inflamed the controversy. In a radio show earlier this month, Tilton noted that the bill, if passed, “definitely would have leaned the election towards, you know, towards Mary Peltola, to be quite honest,” citing the reelection effort of the Democratic U.S. House member, who is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.

The comments drew a sharp response from AFN. In a statement, the organization said the speaker’s comments “raise alarming questions” and show a need for changes.

“The Alaska Native community has long called for improvements to our election system due to persistent barriers in rural Alaska. Rather than contributing to voter disenfranchisement, the legislature should be working toward much-needed reforms,” Ana Hoffman, AFN’s co-chair, said in the statement.

Sparck had strong words about Tilton’s comments, too.

“It tells me she said it out loud,” she said. “Even though we’re voting at such a low rate, they still find us a threat.”

Tilton did not respond to a request for comment. Lawmakers who pushed for the elections change have vowed to continue that effort.

Beyond obstacles to mail-in voting and precinct staffing, there is a sometimes-overlooked aspect of the Alaska Native vote: the potential to be a force in urban districts.

In the famously conservative Matanuska-Susitna Borough on Anchorage’s doorstep, 7% of residents are Native – a percentage similar to that  of the Native population in Montana, where the Indigenous vote is seen as pivotal to election results, Sparck pointed out.

She said she has a message for Native residents of the borough: Lawmakers in those districts are too hostile to rural and Native needs, she said. “So let’s get them more responsive to this population,” she said.

There are signs that Native residents have become an important voting bloc in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city, she said.

In an extremely close Fairbanks North Star Borough mayoral election earlier this month, former state lawmaker Grier Hopkins, a Democrat, edged out another former lawmaker, Republican John Coghill, by a mere 154 votes.

Sparck said the result might have been tipped by Native voters there, she said. She noted that there was a strong get-out-the-vote effort by the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a tribal consortium; Doyon Ltd., the regional Native corporation; and others.

Other urban races could be affected as well if Native voters show up at the polls, she said.

“Obviously, we are a diaspora,” she said. “We live in every precinct in the state.”