JUNEAU, Alaska — A state court judge on Friday disqualified a large number of booklets used to collect signatures for an initiative aimed at repealing Alaska’s Marine Pollution Control Act. ranked choice voting system and gave election officials a deadline to determine whether there were still enough signatures for the measure to qualify for the November ballot.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin’s decision comes in a lawsuit submitted by three voters who wants to keep the withdrawal measure off the ballot. Rankin previously ruled The Elections Department acted within its authority when it allowed the measure’s sponsors to correct errors in petition booklets after they were submitted earlier this year, finding that the agency had met deadlines.
Her new ruling Friday focused on challenges to the signature-gathering methods of the sponsors that were the subject of a recent lawsuit. Rankin set a deadline of Wednesday for the division to remove the signatures and booklets that she said should be disqualified and for the division to determine whether the measure still has enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
The state requires that initiative sponsors meet certain thresholds for collecting signatures, including collecting signatures from voters in at least three-quarters of state House precincts. Proponents of the repeal initiative had to collect a total of 26,705 signatures.
The plaintiffs alleged that petition booklets used to collect signatures were left unattended at businesses and shared by multiple distributors. An expert who testified for the plaintiffs said the suspicious activity was “endemic” to the repeal campaign, according to a filing by attorneys for the plaintiffs, including Scott Kendall.
Kendall was an architect of the successful 2020 ballot initiative that replaced party primaries with open primaries and instituted ranked-choice voting in general elections. In open primaries, the top four vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, 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 willful, deliberate, and orchestrated misconduct to reject” the petition outright. But she said she found instances where the signature-gathering process was not conducted properly, and she disqualified those booklets.
Kevin Clarkson, a former state attorney general who is representing the proponents of the repeal initiative, said by email Friday that the ruling appears “mostly favorable” to his clients.
“We won on many issues and on many of the books they challenged,” he wrote. But he added that he would have to go through the numbers for the books Rankin rejected, a process he said is complicated and takes time.
Kendall said Rankin disqualified 27 petition booklets with nearly 3,000 signatures. “There were clearly serious issues with this petition drive,” he said in a text message.
The Elections Department still needs to assess whether the measure has enough signatures in 30 of the House’s 40 constituencies, “and then all parties will have to consider their appeal options,” he said.
Patty Sullivan, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law, said the Division of Elections “appreciates the court’s swift decision and will recalculate the final signature count based on the court’s ruling as soon as possible.”