Juneau, Alaska – A state court judge on Friday disqualified several booklets used to collect signatures for an initiative seeking to repeal the Alaska law. ranked choice voting system and gave election officials a deadline to determine whether the measure still had enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin’s decision in Anchorage comes in a lawsuit brought by three voters which seeks to disqualify the repeal measure from voting. Rankin previously ruled the Division of Elections acted within its authority when earlier this year it allowed the measure’s sponsors to correct errors in petition booklets after they were turned in and found the agency had met deadlines.
His new decision on Friday focused on challenges to sponsors’ signature-gathering methods that were the subject of a recent trial. Rankin set a deadline of Wednesday for the division to remove signatures and booklets that it felt should be disqualified and for the division to determine whether the measure still has enough signatures to qualify for a vote.
The state requires initiative sponsors to meet certain signature collection thresholds, including obtaining signatures from voters in at least three-quarters of the state’s districts. Supporters of the repeal initiative needed to gather a total of 26,705 signatures.
The plaintiffs alleged that petition booklets, used to collect signatures, were improperly left unattended at businesses and shared among multiple circulators. An expert who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs said suspicious activity was “endemic” to the recall campaign, according to a brief filed by the plaintiffs’ attorneys, including Scott Kendall.
Kendall was the architect of the successful 2020 ballot initiative that replaced partisan primaries with open primaries and instituted ranked-choice voting in general elections. In open primaries, the four most voted candidates, regardless of party, advance to the general election. The new system was used for the first time in 2022 and will be used this year.
Rankin wrote that there was no evidence of a “pervasive pattern of intentional, conscious and orchestrated misconduct to justify” the petition being dismissed outright. But she said she found cases where the signature collection process was not carried out properly and disqualified those booklets.
Kevin Clarkson, a former state attorney general who represents the sponsors of the repeal effort, said in an email Friday that the decision “appears largely favorable” to his clients.
“We won on many issues and on many books they challenged,” he wrote. But he added that he would need to crunch the numbers of those Rankin rejected, a process he said would be complicated and take time.
Kendall said Rankin disqualified 27 petition booklets containing nearly 3,000 signatures. “Clearly there were serious problems with this signature campaign,” he said in a text message.
The Division of Elections must still assess whether the measure has enough signatures in 30 of the 40 House districts, “and then all parties will have to consider their appeal options,” he said.
Patty Sullivan, spokeswoman for the Alaska Department of Law, said the Division of Elections “appreciates the court’s quick decision and will recalculate the final signature count in accordance with the court’s ruling as soon as possible.”
