By ALEX GIMARC
Aug. 26, 2026 – The No on 2 crowd hit mailboxes Saturday with their latest mailer. Their claim this time around is “Measure 2 gets rid of Alaska’s campaign finance transparency,” a specious claim.
Why? Campaign finance reporting should Measure 2 pass reverts back to what it was before Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) was passed. Last I checked, the Alaska Public Offices Commission was still in business and campaign finance reports were still made and are still available before RCV passed six long years ago.
The No on 2 crowd makes a big deal about dark money. Their flyer carries a photo of Elon Musk claiming, “Elon Musk Spends Big In Push To Repeal Alaska’s Voting System.” Oh, the horror. Oh, the humanity. No mention of the top 3 funders of No on 2, all Outside PACs, Unite America, Denver, Voters for the American Center, Inc, and AFSCME, both headquartered in Washington DC.
Take a look at the campaign finance stunts legal today under RCV. Outside Tech Bros supporting Gubernatorial front runner Jonathan Kreiss-Thompkins (JKT) wait until the day after the 90-day reporting deadline to drop nearly two million dollars of Outside tech money for his campaign to spend for months with absolutely no transparency.
Democrat Bill Hill comes out of nowhere with $1.3 million of Outside money and a cookie cutter campaign to replace Nick Begich in congress.
Apparently, unaccountable, completely opaque Outside money donated by the Tech Bros and leftist billionaires are perfectly acceptable for democrats and celebrated by the No on 2 crowd but Elon Musk like Orange Man and Tall Man Bad. Got it. Right.
But repealing RCV touches other things than campaign finance.
If RCV did not exist, the Peltola dirty trick of running Decoy Dan out of Petersburg as a Republican would have been solved in the August primary rather than making it to the November General Election.
The Decoy Dan gambit has turned Alaska elections into a national embarrassment, a laughingstock. Great job Lisa. Great job, Scott. reat job by the black-robed bobble heads on the Alaska Supreme Court. Great job, Democrats. You must all be very proud.
No RCV, no Gerald Heikes, a completely artificial construct funded by a MA billionaire, today within 17 votes of making the November General Election as a Senate candidate. Like Decoy Dan, he would have also disappeared in the August primary.
The final claim that the No on 2 crowd makes in its flyer is “Less Transparency = More Corruption.” What rot. How much less transparent can you possibly be than a democrat filing as a non-partisan, independent, or this year’s favorite a Republican. If you can’t even describe what you are and what you actually believe, how is that possibly transparent? How is it anything other than fundamentally corrupt?
While repealing RCV won’t solve the current mess completely, it will at least move us back to 2020 when Alaskan elections were not a national embarrassment, which would be a good start.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
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6 thoughts on “Alex Gimarc: The claims by the ‘No on 2’ crowd don’t pass the truth test”
They didnt when tye RCV Measure2 was on the ballot the,first time They never will.its always been a,deceptionto grab power
Several good points. Leftists ALWAYS accuse others of exactly what they themselves are doing. Along with the voting machines and the mail-in ballots, RCV is just another democrat cheating tool. They’re not even trying to hide it anymore.
They can’t win if they can’t cheat and they know it.
What about the 2020 attempted election steal and violence and the fake set of electors. And Capitol floor pooping. Does that count as cheating in your mind?
The ads about “outside dark money” are funded by…. outside dark money. The dems don’t even try to hide it. They think they are speaking in an echo chamber, to idiots. Unfortunately, they may be correct in that assessment.
Well Tamra, you’ve got child-killer and empathy-free crook Musk supporting your side. Is that OK with you?
A tangential and disturbing element to this is that the dark money folks from Outside can produce and run media that consists of complete lies without consequence. If the media is to be believed, Senator Dan Sullivan is a pedophile, a human trafficker and out to destroy Alaska dip-netters. Compounding the problem is that the Alaska media, particularly the leading Anchorage television station, will gleefully accept probably MILLIONS to spread the lies. A legitimate and honorable broadcaster would have the courage and integrity to say “no” to the dissemination of lies. The Bramstedt family would be ashamed.
I am going to write to FCC Chair Brendan Carr and ask the FCC to re-open the approval of the acquisition of Channel 11 several years back. That acquisition appeared to violate a number of station acquisition rules. And maybe the FCC could also consider antitrust issues, and, the “public interest” that is not being served in 2026.