Lame-duck assembly may decide otherwise, but municipal elections will remain in October

The editorial “we” of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner concludes that it’s a great idea to end the tradition of holding municipal elections for local government in October and move them to November on the same day as state and federal elections.

It’s a bad idea for many reasons, as I wrote here last week.

It would be impossible for the News-Miner, KUAC and local TV to provide coverage of local candidates and local issues if the municipal election occurred on the same day as the state and federal election.

There would be no time or space to cover the assembly, school board, city council and mayoral races when the state and federal races would grab all the attention. Voters would be more uninformed than they are today.

The lame-duck assembly, after hearing testimony last week that mostly opposed Tammie Wilson’s plan to move municipal elections to November, ran out of time and didn’t vote before the mandatory meeting adjournment Thursday at 11:30 p.m.

The assembly plans to resume the meeting Thursday evening.

“So with these numbers, could another takeaway be that maybe we’re having too many elections?" Wilson wondered aloud last week. “And should go to an every other year so we’re not stressing voters out every year, coming back and having to vote?”

Wilson, who lost her campaign for re-election, is drawing the wrong lessons about elections and stressed out voters.

The assembly under presiding officer Aaron Lojewski might approve the Wilson plan to move the borough elections to November on a predictable 5-4 vote, with Kristan Kelly, Mindy O’Neall, Savannah Fletcher and David Guttenberg opposed.

If that happens, I expect that either Borough Mayor Bryce Ward will veto the ordinance or the new assembly will vote next month to retain the old schedule.

Three of the five supporters of the move to November—Lojewski, Wilson and Jimi Cash—will soon to be gone from the assembly. The only two supporters remaining will be Barbara Haney and Brett Rotermund.

The assembly could save time and money by voting this down Thursday, but don’t count on it.

The Wilson cure for stressed out voters would mean doubling the number of temporary election workers from 250 to about 500 in the Fairbanks area and requiring voters who go to the polls to wait in one line to receive the state and federal election ballot, and a second line to receive the election ballot for borough contests.

The City of Fairbanks has good reason to keep its election in October. Holding the vote in November does not give enough time for the city to do a thorough job on its annual budget and get it into place by the end of the year.

The cavalier suggestion of the News-Miner editorial, that the state can simply amend the law to allow a single ballot, is laughable. There is no chance of that happening.

The election boundaries are different. The election systems are different. One is for ranked choice voting and one is not. The way to prevent an unworkable nightmare is to keep the current system.

All of the key details in the Wilson plan are unexamined.

It was fitting that Republican Rep. Frank Tomaszewski, who tried and failed to get municipal elections moved to November when he was on the assembly in 2022, invented a fake statistic to claim than moving the election would save voters $90,000. He testified to the assembly with complete confidence in his made-up numbers.

“We had about 10,000 voters show up at the polls this last election. If they on average used 2 gallons of gas, that’s 20 gallons of gasoline. If we cut that in, that’s about today’s prices that’s about $90,000. So you’re saving the voters about $90,000 a year,” Tomaszewski told the assembly.

Tomaszewski is a member of the House Finance Committee, responsible for understanding multibillion-dollar budgets. No one who creates imaginary statistics and then thinks they are real belongs on the House Finance Committee.

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