Pam Melin: We don’t need a ‘bigger’ election system. We need an honest one and SB 64 isn’t honest.

By PAM MELIN

April 15, 2026 – Juneau is at it again, and this time they want you to believe it’s “bipartisan,” so you don’t look too closely. Senate Bill 64, the legislative love child of the hallway hustlers, is being sold as election modernization: More access. More convenience. More confidence.

Let’s dissect this bill that is now on the governor’s desk for his consideration: To veto or not to veto? That is the question.

SB 64 makes an already complicated system more bloated, harder to follow, and even less trusted by the people who actually have to live with it.

Alaskans are still navigating messy ranked-choice voting and open primaries. Whether you support them or not, confidence in the system isn’t exactly soaring. So what’s the response from the political class?

They want to add more layers, enable even more mail-in voting. More ballot curing. More automatic registration tied to the Permanent Fund Dividend.

And somehow we’re supposed to believe this restores trust?

Senate Bill 64 doesn’t pass the smell test. In fact, it stinks. It isn’t a single, clean reform, but rather is a bundled bill, mixing absentee ballot expansion, ballot curing machinations, and automatic voter registration mechanisms into one package that lawmakers are told to take or leave.

That’s not good government. That’s leverage.

And it didn’t just appear out of thin air with broad, organic support. It was negotiated, packaged, and pushed under the safe label of “bipartisan,” the oldest trick in the Juneau trick-book.

Call it what it is: political cover. Because when you start hearing talk about veto overrides before the ink is even dry, you have to ask a very simple question: What were they thinking?

Alaskans aren’t naive. They’ve watched this game long enough. Pressure gets applied. Votes are leveraged. Ethics complaints might get dismissed. Lines get blurred. And suddenly, people who campaign one way start voting another way.

Not because the bill got better, but because the politics got heavier.

There’s no urgency to “fix” our election system with more complicators. The only thing that needs fixing right now is ranked-choice voting — and this bill studiously avoids that elephant in the room.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has a clear choice. He should veto this bill.

And to the Republicans floating a potential override, this is your moment. Don’t try to hide behind process or “bipartisan wins,” but  decide whether you actually meant what you told your voters when you ran.

Because you don’t get to campaign on election integrity and then turn around and make worse the very system people already don’t trust.

Alaskans are paying attention and if the Legislature was paying attention to today’s news, they should be aware that the Supreme Court is signaling it will strike down state laws allowing ballots to arrive after Election Day. That piece of SB 64 is already facing the firing squad.

I for one am done being told to trust a system that keeps getting bigger, more complicated, and harder to believe in.

If you want confidence back, stop monkeying with the system. And stop pretending that this “bipartisan” fix is not, at its core, an attempt to rig future elections.

Pam Melin lives in the Mat-Su Valley.

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