C2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, JUNE 9 , 2022
into Young’s tenure, Alaska was
under attack “on all fronts,” as
he’d put it — alluding to environ-
mental policies that curb re-
source development — and it was
“not the time to take risks on
someone untested and unprov-
en.”
But on the second flight, dur-
ing the descent into Seattle, Alas-
ka’s only congressman lost con-
sciousness. After the plane land-
ed at Sea-Tac, the dean of the U.S.
House was carried to the jet
bridge and, after resuscitation
attempts, pronounced dead.
And that is how Alaska became
the location of 2022’s most chaot-
ic exercise in procedural democ-
racy. A special election is happen-
ing now, almost entirely by mail,
to fill the final four months of
Young’s term. Alaskans have
called it “the $100 lottery,” a nod
to the easy filing fee and the
state’s new voting system: an
all-party, pick-one primary that
advances the top four vote-getters
to a ranked-choice general elec-
tion. With the legendary con-
gressman removed from the
equation, a handful of candidates
ballooned to 48. Six Democrats,
16 Republicans, two libertarians
and 24 unaligned or independent
candidates are smushed together
on the same single-page ballot,
which Alaskans need to postmark
by Saturday.
Multiple combat veterans are
running. Multiple members of
Don Young’s inner circle are run-
ning. Multiple Indigenous lead-
ers are running, and any would be
the first Native member of the
state’s congressional delegation.
The man Y oung defeated to first
take the seat in 1973 is running
again, at 89 years old.
Sarah Palin is running, though
many Alaskans would rather she
wasn’t.
A man named Santa Claus is
running.
One bottom-tier candidate’s
stance on abortion rights hinges
on reversible vasectomies for
“sperm creators.” Another lives in
a remote town of five people and
in 2017 pleaded guilty to threat-
ening to assault employees of the
Bureau of Land Management, be-
cause, he says, they were ob-
structing his mining ambitions.
The v olume of candidates
means that one could theoretical-
ly squeak into the finals with just
a sliver of the vote, and so the race
has become a poll rush, a modern-
day chance at a big strike, the
kind of haphazard opportunity
that defines Alaskan mythology.
“I came into this with a calcula-
tion that I could get in the top
four with not that many votes,”
says state legislator Adam Wool
over beers in Seward, where he
was attending the state Demo-
cratic convention. He views him-
self as a “tough Democrat” who
can attract just enough support
around his conservative district
in Fairbanks. In one poll last
month, W ool was pulling 2 per-
cent — which, in a race with 48
people, could be just a handful of
points from making the final four.
“The margin between fourth
place and fifth place is going to beALASKA FROM C1 small,” said Wigi Tozzi, organiz-
ing director for the Alaska Demo-
cratic Party, during an election-
training session last month. “It
might be two or three or five
votes. Because of that, every
spoiled ballot” — one that is
marked incorrectly and therefore
not counted — “is going to make a
difference.”
“I predict there will be more
spoiled ballots than in any other
race in U.S. history,” says Suzanne
Downing, who runs the conserva-
tive news website Must Read
Alaska, since the state is “hustling
through the fastest election possi-
ble” using an unfamiliar protocol.
Young’s death not only forced
Alaska into an administrative
emergency with its elections sys-
tem, but also cracked the coali-
tion of voters that had kept him in
office to seduce and battle the
federal government: the camps of
pipeline workers, the anti-tax
Democrats and pro-union Repub-
licans and crude-friendly inde-
pendents, the Yup’ik Natives out
west and the Inupiats on the
North Slope, the pothead gold
miners in the Interior, the swash-
buckling ice cutters at sea, the
military vets who fled trauma for
wilderness, the belly slitters on
the slime lines in the Kenai Penin-
sula, the overworked and under-
paid schoolteachers in Anchor-
age and Juneau, all the sundry
tradesmen and artists and Team-
sters and missionaries and subur-
ban mama bears and leave-me-
aloners scuttling on and off the
grid in gorgeous, dangerous,
“KEEP OUT” America.
“Don Young was the represen-
tative of all Alaska,” says Gene-
vieve Mina, 26, the president of
the Alaska Young Democrats.
“For Alaskans, this is more than
who’s going to be that one vote in
Congress. It’s more who’s going to
be that figurehead.”
For generations, Alaskans sent
the same man to Washington, and
thus the same message: Give us
money and control of our land
and then leave us alone. Now
there is a chance to send a new
person, and perhaps a new mes-
sage, through a new experiment
in democracy.Alaska is an easy place to
accidentally disappear in,
or purposefully disappear
to. It’s a place of abandon and
abandonment. One vista: junk-
yard shanties that make you wor-
ry about America. Nearby: m oun-
tains that might make you believe
in God. On a 1,400-mile drive
around the state you can meet bar
managers in Delta Junction who
are hyper-fluent in local issues,
such as barley production, but
don’t actually know that Don
Young is dead. You can meet
miners in Fairbanks and National
Guard members from Fort Greely
who say their hidden work pre-
serves the American way of life.
You can visit a church in a Native
village, out in Alaska’s “unorga-
nized” boroughs, and watch a
White pastor preach to a single
Indigenous woman, collect a
monetary offering from her and
invite you back to chat at his
homestead, whereupon you ask
about the white flag with the redcross flying from his front door,
and receive this answer: “Admit-
tedly, it’s from the Crusades.”
Earliest Native settlers arrived
from Asia around 12,000 years
ago. The United States bought the
land from the Russian empire in
1867 for $7.2 million. In 1935, in
between the discovery of gold and
the era of oil, Army Gen. William
“Billy” Mitchell told a congres-
sional committee something that
would become a kind of state
motto: “I believe that, in the
future, whoever holds Alaska will
hold the world.” Statehood swiftly
followed a big strike of oil in 1957
because Alaska had become more
than just a territory: It was a
crow’s nest for the Cold War and a
well of natural resources for a
modern superpower.
These days Alaska is America
refracted and exaggerated. Oil
still drives a boom-and-bust
economy, making the state a kind
of war profiteer and a staging
ground for climate change. Alas-
ka sits on a large reserve of
natural gas, and most House can-
didates want a pipeline built,
though the state is warming two
to three times faster than the rest
of the country. Roads are buck-
ling as permafrost melts. Villages
are falling into rivers and bays,
though Kodiak now runs on
about 99 percent renewable en-
ergy.
Alaska is a red state with blue
dots and purple streaks. It is
pro-gun, pro-union, pro-extrac-
tion and pro-marijuana. It is sus-
picious of the federal government
in spite (or because) of the fact
that the federal government owns
60 percent of its land. Alaskans,
among the least-taxed Ameri-
cans, receive a yearly check with a
dividend from the state’s oil
wealth (last year it was $1,114 per
person).
Alaska “is fiscally conservative,
socially libertarian and very Alas-
ka-nationalistic,” says Mark Be-
gich, a Democrat who served in
the U.S. Senate from 2009 to 2015,
and whose Republican nephew is
running to replace Young. Alas-
kans “have this contradictory
philosophy. On the one hand, it’s
‘Federal government, we don’t
want you here.’ On the other
hand, it’s ‘Please give us as much
as we can get.’ ”
Alaska has both rainforest and
tundra. It is high-tech and low-in-
frastructure. Hundreds of Native
villages are reachable only by
plane, and some don’t have
broadband internet or even run-
ning water. Clear Space Force
Station has a new $1.5 billion
radar to distinguish between
types of missile debris in the
upper atmosphere. The state —
the sparsest in the union with an
average of 1.1 people per square
mile — has the highest concentra-
tion of military veterans in thecountry. Anchorage has some of
the most diverse neighborhoods
in the nation, with more than 90
languages spoken in the city’s
school district. Minutes from civi-
lization, in almost any direction,
is unforgiving wilderness.
The biggest voting bloc in Alas-
ka is undeclared or nonpartisan
voters, who outnumber all regis-
tered Democrats and Republi-
cans. Relying on this state trait,
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R) side-
stepped a loss in the 2010 Repub-
lican primary and won reelection
as a write-in candidate. The vot-
ing system that will be tested this
year was conceived by attorney
Scott Kendall, Murkowski’s coun-
sel for that campaign. Kendall
envisioned a system that would
incentivize civility and pragma-
tism, dilute the influence of polit-
ical parties and dark money, and
deliver consensus winners with
broad appeal. His solution was to
remove partisan primaries and
allow Alaskans to rank their pref-
erences.
“It’s impossible to know how it
will turn out, and that’s a good
thing,” Kendall says. “Under the
old system, the parties had the
power to hand-select the two
choices for voters. But instead
we’ve got multiple candidates
from both major parties, plus a
number of independent and
smaller-party candidates. Com-
bining that with a seat that hasn’t
been open for 50 years, plus doing
a statewide election by mail for
the very first time in Alaska’s
history — there’s a lot of uncer-
tainty but also more excitement
and engagement.”
“I may be too Pollyanna, but
maybe it’ll create a little more
respect in the political process,”
says Kim Reitmeier, president of
an association of Native regional
corporations that has endorsed
Republican Tara Sweeney, a tribal
member of the Iñupiat Commu-
nity of the Arctic Slope. “We
continually try to encourage our
Alaska Native people to run for
seats; however, many shy away
because of the ugliness of cam-
paigning. So I would love some of
the negativity removed.”
Alaska, in its 64th year of
statehood, could serve as a model
for a country in the stranglehold
of two hyper-polarized parties,
says Amy Lauren Lovecraft, a
political science professor at the
University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
“If we can get these elections
right, we could be a demonstra-
tion to the rest of the country
about how it’s not too difficult to
go without just two parties,”
Lovecraft says. “That you can
figure it out. That it is possible to
vote your conscience.”
She adds: “What will be inter-
esting is: Do people actually un-
derstand how to vote, and will
they do it correctly?”Alaska: The new frontierin American elections?The crowded field of candidates, includes, from top right,
nonpartisan Al Gross, Republican Josh Revak, Republican John B.
Coghill Jr., Democrat Mary Peltola, nonpartisan Jeff Lowenfels,
Democrat Christopher Constant and Republican Nick Begich III.
Alaskans are calling it “the $100 lottery” because of the state’s new
voting system and filing fee.PHOTOS BY ASH ADAMS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
A person sits in a chair along the coastal trail near Point Woronzof, a popular place to watch planes fly out of Anchorage. Amid this
peaceful-looking terrain, 2022’s most chaotic exercise in procedural democracy is taking place to fill Alaska’s sole U.S. House seat.