ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Anchorage resident Bob Butera is a nonpartisan voter — one of more than 381,000 such voters in Alaska. Before 2022, Butera regularly faced an election year conundrum: which partisan primary ballot to pick?

“I want to choose a Republican in one race and maybe a Democrat in another,” Butera said. “I was prevented from doing that.”

Under a system that had been used for decades, Republican candidates were on one primary ballot while Democrats were on another. But when Alaskans adopted an election reform initiative in 2020, all that changed. For the first time in years, all candidates appeared on a single primary ballot.

Butera was thrilled by the change, he said.

But under a ballot initiative that will appear before voters this November, the 2020 measure could be reversed, returning Alaska to a partisan primary system. This year’s initiative would also reverse other major changes adopted in 2020, including the top-four ranked choice voting system, and new campaign disclosure laws that shed more light on the identity of people and groups spending money to sway Alaska’s election outcomes.

This year’s repeal effort was at the center of a public debate Monday between two Alaska attorneys who argued for and against its passage. The event was hosted by Commonwealth North, a nonpartisan policy organization.

Arguing for the repeal of Alaska’s current election system was former Attorney General Craig Richards.

Richards is a registered Republican who worked for Republican-turned-independent Gov. Bill Walker. He told Butera and other audience members that under the partisan primary system, he too would occasionally pick the Democratic primary ballot.

“I didn’t find it that offensive, myself,” Richards said.

Arguing against the repeal was Scott Kendall, who helped author the 2020 initiative and has since taken a leading role in defending it and extolling the virtues of the new system.

Kendall, who also worked for Walker, said that the loss of the open primary system would be to the detriment of the 64% of Alaska voters who are registered as nonpartisan or undeclared — just like Butera.

If the initiative were to pass, political parties would have the ability to bar independent and nonpartisan voters from voting in their partisan primaries, allowing only registered party members to cast their ballots in partisan primaries.

Republican supporters of the initiative have publicly pushed back on the assertion that they intend to close their primaries. But Kendall said that “closing primaries is very much in vogue right now.” Republicans in both Texas and Louisiana have recently sought to close primaries to non-party members. More than a dozen states already have closed primaries.

Attorney Scott Kendall supported No on Prop 2 during a debate hosted by Commonwealth North at the Petroleum Club of Anchorage on Monday, Sept. 28. (Bill Roth / ADN)“I think it would be disingenuous to say ‘the parties won’t do that, they’ve never done that,’ ” Kendall said. “There’s a clause in the law for a reason. Everyone would fully expect that one or both of the parties would exercise it.”

Alaska has a long history with so-called “blanket primaries,” under which all candidates appear on the same primary ballot regardless of party affiliation. The method was in use prior to statehood. It was briefly replaced with a partisan primary system between 1960 and 1967, before blanket primaries were restored until 1992, when the method was replaced with partisan primaries in response to a lawsuit from the Republican Party of Alaska.

Between 2004 and 2020, the GOP allowed only Republicans, nonpartisans and undeclared voters to have access to Alaska’s Republican primary ballot. The Democratic ballot, which also featured candidates from other political parties, was open to all voters in those years.

The closed Republican primary regularly favored more conservative challengers to moderate GOP members. In 2010, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski famously lost the GOP primary to a more conservative opponent, before winning the general election after mounting a write-in campaign.

Alaska political consultant Jim Lottsfeldt recently said in an interview with Anchorage Rep. Andrew Gray that he worked with Kendall on crafting what became the 2020 initiative.

“When that ballot initiative first started, it was just to open primaries. It was me and Scott Kendall shopping this idea around,” Lottsfeldt told Gray in a podcast interview. “We were doing it because we’d seen Joe Miller beat Lisa Murkowski and we were trying to protect Lisa Murkowski.”

“The ranked choice people from out-of-state said, ‘Hey, we’ll pay for this but you’ve got to include ranked choice voting,’ and that went forward,” Lottsfeldt said. “I said goodbye to the effort, because I didn’t know if that was a good idea or not.”

Kendall refuted Lottsfeldt’s comments.

“Lottsfeldt’s claims to have some special insight about the process of drafting the measure or my motives for drafting it are categorically false,” Kendall said. “I drafted the measure out of frustration from working with legislators who were unwilling to take necessary votes or work in a bipartisan manner for fear of being ‘primaried.’ “

Both Kendall and Lottsfeldt have worked for Murkowski or for groups supporting her reelection efforts over the years.

“I wish we had just opened our primaries and then we wouldn’t be spending millions of dollars defending something, because everyone would be happy,” Lottsfeldt told Gray.

‘Logroll of all logrolls’

Richards called the 2020 measure “a logroll of all logrolls.”

“Liberal campaign operatives in Alaska, funded by a few liberal megadonors from Outside, convinced Alaskan voters to change how we count votes in order to change election outcomes,” Richards said during the debate.

Under the system adopted in 2020, the top four vote-getters in the open primary advance to a general election that is determined by ranked choice voting. Though several prominent conservative candidates have won statewide elections under the new system, Richards said it disadvantages Republicans.

“You’re forcing people of the same party to run against each other in the general,” he said. “Over time, it’s going to definitely end up hurting Republicans, because they tend to get more votes.”

The Alaska Republican Party resolved in 2024 to work to repeal ranked choice voting. Party leaders’ concern about the system is motivated in large part by the result of a 2022 U.S. House race in which Mary Peltola, a Democrat, was able to defeat two Republican opponents who spent much of the campaign attacking each other.

But in the same year that Peltola won, Gov. Mike Dunleavy — a conservative Republican — was reelected governor, even as he faced a Republican opponent in the general election.

“I think what you see is, Alaskans are not hidebound by these party labels. They vote how they want,” Kendall said.

‘Absolute clown show’

The current governor’s race has become a particularly vivid example of the debate over how Alaska’s new system works.

Richards said the election system is giving “a massive advantage” to Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, the one Democratic candidate in this year’s race for governor, because he faces three Republican opponents.

“It’s not because Democrats are more popular than Republicans,” Richards added. “In this cycle, the Democrats played the game better than Republicans. A not uncommon phenomenon if you’re familiar with Alaska politics.”

Whether the three-Republican field creates an advantage for Kreiss-Tomkins depends in part on whether supporters of the three Republican gubernatorial candidates — Bernadette Wilson, Dave Bronson and Treg Taylor — rank all three of them come November.

Recent election cycles have shown that a sizable share of Alaska voters don’t rank more than one candidate, even when there are multiple ideologically aligned options.

“I don’t know if anyone has figured out the psychology and the percentages of why this occurs,” Richards said. He suggested it’s because of “the antagonism that carries over from the primary” or because voters don’t like the ranked choice system, so they don’t participate in it even if it’s in their political interest. The voting method has been subject to attacks from prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump.

In an effort to increase the share of voters who rank candidates, two candidates — Bronson and Taylor — recently filmed a joint campaign ad calling for their supporters to rank all three Republicans in the governor’s race. But Wilson, the third Republican in the race, did not accept the offer to participate in the joint ad, and has instead called on Bronson and Taylor to drop out of the race.

Richards called this year’s race for governor — which featured 17 primary candidates, including 12 Republicans — an “absolute clown show.”

“How do you stand before Alaskans and say this is a reasonable, responsible outcome, where voters’ intentions and desires are really being honored?” he asked.

Kendall said Richards’ qualms about the race are a reflection of the candidates, rather than the system under which they are running.

“One thing ranked choice voting can’t solve for is candidate quality,” Kendall said. “That’s not a question for the system, that’s a question for the candidates themselves.”

‘Find your own billionaires’

This year’s initiative is the second attempt to repeal the 2020 election reform, after a 2024 initiative narrowly failed to pass.

But there is a key difference between the two initiatives. The 2024 measure would have repealed ranked choice voting and open primaries, while keeping in place new campaign disclosure laws adopted in 2020. This year’s initiative is looking to repeal those disclosure laws, too.

Richards said the initiative backers sought to reverse all the changes made in 2020 to avoid the complexity of keeping some reforms while eliminating others. Kendall said that the campaign disclosure laws — which have become the focus of ads run by the anti-repeal campaign group — are extremely popular.

“Why would you repeal something that over 90% of Alaskans like?” he asked.

The campaign finance laws require groups to disclose what is referred to as the “true source” of their funding. That is the reason that the repeal campaign this year was required to disclose that tech billionaire Elon Musk gave $1.5 million to their effort, despite the fact that the money was funneled through an intermediary political action committee.

Richards said that the new reporting requirements burden would-be contributors and groups like Repeal Now, which accepted contributions from Musk and other billionaires.

“It’s virtually impossible for an individual Alaskan to be a major donor or receiver of donations in this state without third-party professional help unless they’ve done it a bunch of times, because the system is so complex,” Richards said.

Supporters of this year’s initiative are outspent by the group No on 2, which is campaigning against the initiative. No on 2 reported bringing in $6.6 million as of earlier this month, roughly three times the amount reported by the repeal group.

Both sides of the issue are sponsored this year by Outside megadonors.

The No on 2 group receives much of its funding through a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit called Voters For The American Center and the Colorado-based Unite America PAC. Individual contributors are regularly reported to the state, and include billionaires John Arnold, Michael Bloomberg and Kathryn Murdoch.

Kendall said that the opposition to the repeal effort is also supported by a broad, cross-partisan coalition of Alaska leaders and groups, including several unions and Alaska Native organizations.

Richards said Kendall’s claims were tantamount to saying “our billionaires are worse than his billionaires.”

“It’s pretty clear, if one side is funded by billionaires, you’ve got to find your own billionaires,” he said.

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