Alaska election officials rejected 1,303 ballots this November. Here’s why.

Election officials rejected 1,303 absentee ballots in the November 2024 general election, according to a report from the Alaska Division of Elections. That’s a rejection rate of roughly 1.7%, in line with the 1.6% rate the state reported during the general election in 2022.

It’s a significantly lower rate than in the June 2022 special primary election following Congressman Don Young’s death. In that race, the state’s first all-mail election, officials rejected 4.5% of all the ballots cast across the state. That included nearly 14% of all ballots cast in the four House districts representing predominantly Alaska Native communities off the state’s road system. The high rejection rate in the 2022 special primary led to lawsuits from civil rights groups.

Get Out The Native Vote director Michelle Sparck said the relatively low rejection rate in 2024 was good news, especially when compared to the 2022 special primary.

“It’s definitely a bigger sigh of relief,” she said. “Still, we’ve got our work cut out for us on getting better at this voting process.”

The number of rejected absentee ballots was greater than the margin of victory in two races, though it’s not clear that the rejected ballots would have changed the outcome.

Election officials rejected 72 absentee votes in House District 18 in North Anchorage. That’s the highest raw total in the state and more than three times the 22-vote margin by which Republican David Nelson defeated Democratic Rep. Cliff Groh.

And officials rejected 16 ballots in Wasilla’s House District 28, where Elexie Moore defeated fellow Republican Steve Menard in the final ranked choice tally by just nine votes following a recount.

The most common reason for rejecting a ballot was “insufficient or improper witnessing,” according to a report first obtained by the Anchorage Daily News. That accounts for nearly 40% of the rejected ballots.

Alaska law requires both the voter and a witness to sign an absentee ballot. Some state lawmakers have proposed eliminating the witness signature requirement or giving voters a chance to fix their error. That’s known as ballot curing.

Some 13% of the rejected ballots had a missing or incorrect “voter identifier” — their date of birth, ID number, voter number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, and 8% were rejected for a missing voter signature.

Another 11% of the rejected absentee ballots were postmarked after Election Day. Most of Alaska’s mail is postmarked in Anchorage and Juneau, so those rejections may have included ballots dropped in the mailbox ahead of the statutory deadline. An additional 6% were rejected because they arrived too late.

Twelve ballots, less than 1% of the rejections, “were forwarded to the Criminal Division at the Department of Law for further investigation,” a Division of Elections spokesperson said, citing division Operations Manager Michaela Thompson.

Ballot curing processes could allow voters to correct some of the issues, including things like missing signatures and identifiers. Sparck said she’s “fully on board” with ballot curing, though she says chronic staffing issues at rural Alaska precincts and mail delays could present complications. She said she’s optimistic lawmakers will tackle the issue during the upcoming legislative session.

“We think that with the bipartisan coalitions, we have a chance to tackle these systemic barriers … to make voting accessibility a better reality for rural Alaska and for tribal precincts,” she said.

Nine other states require absentee ballots to be witnessed or notarized.

House District 40, covering the North Slope and Northwest Arctic Boroughs, saw the highest rejection rate. Some 5.2% of the absentee ballots cast in that race were not counted. Half of those had an insufficient or improper witness signature.

In 2020, when the witness signature requirement was suspended because of the pandemic, fewer than 1% of absentee ballots were rejected.