Scott Ogan: About that ‘election integrity’ bill the governor vetoed

By SCOTT OGAN

April 9, 2026 – SB 64, the so-called election integrity bill, was just vetoed and the governor’s veto sustained by two votes.

Rep. Sarah Vance was the point person on the House side, once having worked closely with Sen. Mike Shower’s office where I served as his Senior Policy Advisor. Together, we were in the rooms where negotiations and debates over technical election issues were being had.

For three sessions, I was the principal researcher on most election issues that shaped Sen. Shower’s legislative agenda. Shower’s policy metric was simple: Make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. I applaud Rep. Vance’s years of effort. Getting any election bill through a Democrat-dominated Senate coalition in today’s Juneau is laudable. As they say in politics, no good deed goes unpunished.

That said, SB 64 did not have enough “hard to cheat” provisions to balance the “easy to vote” concessions.

More than once during Sen.Shower’s tenure, we killed our own hard work in the final hours because of late amendments by those who wanted to make it easy to vote and easy to cheat. The same forces gutted SB 64. Democrats stripped out the security architecture and left only the eye candy.

Shower’s intent was an election system built on inclusion of legal voters and valid ballots, not exclusion. Alaska’s system has largely been built to identify ballots to reject. If a voter is eligible and a ballot is valid, why are we trying to exclude them?

In-person voting has an almost flawless error rate and is the most secure way to vote. It must be the baseline, available to every voter in every precinct for every election and never diminished for the sake of mail-in convenience. Voting by mail carries significantly higher rejection rates and greater potential for outside intrusion.

When you add ranked-choice voting, the problems multiply. RCV is almost impossible to recount by hand.  Rural voters, Alaska Native communities, military members, and communities where in-person voting has been reduced are all at highest risk of having their ballots rejected. The Division of Elections does not inform you if your ballot was rejected. Why would anyone accept that?

Many misunderstand ballot curing. Curing is not changing your vote.  Courts have consistently ruled that correcting technical errors is a voter’s right. If you make an error while voting in person, you fix it on the spot. That right is not extinguished because you vote by mail. But curing without Shower’s sideboards is dangerous. His framework required a Technical Error Review Board with partisan balance and public oversight, an official ledger, fraud referral to the Attorney General when someone reports a ballot was cast without their knowledge, and multi-channel notification. All of that was stripped out.

The bill also failed to fix corrupted voter data, implement a 50-state verification system, screen Permanent Fund dividend applicants before adding them to voter rolls, require ballot watermarks to prevent counterfeit ballots, establish an election crimes unit, or create a solid chain of custody for mail-in ballots. It included a true source donor provision forcing exposure of individual political donors, inviting harassment and retaliation for constitutionally protected speech.

Three solutions can fix this

First, change PFD automatic voter registration from opt-out to opt-in. Present applicants with a screen asking whether they want to register or update. No data enters the voter rolls until fully vetted, confirmed legal, eligible, and not listed on any other state’s voting rolls.

Second, assign all eligible voters multi-factor authentication, the same technology protecting your bank account and your MyAlaska account.

Third, implement barcode ballot tracking with secure chain of custody for every absentee ballot.

Protecting our data from hackers, cleaning it up using every available tool, and protecting cast ballots both in person and by mail are the three most critical things we can do. The Governor made the right call. It’s not too late to get it right.

Scott Ogan served from 1995 to 2001, in the Alaska House of Representatives. He served in the Alaska State Senate from 2001 until 2004.