Ranked-choice roulette: Alaska’s governor race is now a game of fifths, sixths and backroom deals

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Aug. 28, 2026 – What a mess ranked-choice voting has made of Alaska’s race for governor.

Under the traditional election system, the August primary would have produced a Republican nominee, a Democrat nominee, probably a Libertarian and perhaps another minor-party candidate.

Voters would know which candidates represented which political parties, and the parties would be responsible for choosing their standard-bearers.

Instead, Alaska has the “final four” … followed by candidates five, six, seven and all the way down to 17, each potentially affecting who appears on the November ballot.

Nobody can be certain who the final four will be until Monday’s withdrawal deadline passes. Campaigns, unions, business interests, and political operatives are negotiating around a ballot order that can change by the hour.

Former Attorney General Treg Taylor is presently the fifth-place candidate. Former Sen. Click Bishop is sixth.

But those numbers are not as final as they sound.

Under Alaska’s ranked-choice statute, when one of the top four candidates withdraws at least 64 days before the general election, the Division of Elections fills the vacancy with the next-highest finisher, (caveat, so long as the running mates drop as well). The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that this process continues through successive withdrawals. If two candidates leave, candidates five and six can move up.

That makes Taylor and Bishop enormously important to the negotiations now taking place.

Taylor may be pushed out of contention by the Alaska Public Offices Commission over an allegedly incomplete financial disclosure. APOC staff says he did not provide complete names for tenants who generated more than half of the income reported on his disclosure. Staff has recommended that the commission consider advising the lieutenant governor not to certify him.

If Taylor is disqualified or withdraws on his own, Bishop, who is a Democrat in GOP clothing, effectively becomes the next man in line.

Then there is the Democratic side.

Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins and Tom Begich (T-Beg)finished in the first two positions. They are reportedly discussing whether to combine forces on a single governor-lieutenant governor ticket. If one leaves the governor’s race to join the other’s ticket, that creates another vacancy.

Suddenly Bishop, who finished sixth, could find himself in the final four.

This possibility helps explain why Bishop’s decision has become so consequential.

If Bishop believed there was no conceivable path from sixth place into the final four, his campaign would be over. That would leave him free to negotiate a place as lieutenant governor on another candidate’s ticket.

But if Taylor is removed and one of the two leading Democrats leaves the governor’s contest to form a joint ticket, Bishop could move into fourth place. Why would he withdraw to become someone else’s running mate if he believes he may soon have his own place on the November ballot?

That is the beyond-bizarre leverage created by ranked-choice voting.

Breaking: APOC staff recommends Treg Taylor be denied certification over incomplete financial disclosure

Bishop also sits at the center of the Democrats’ political calculations. Democratic strategists appear to believe that Bishop’s voters are more moderate and more willing to rank a Democrat than are the supporters of Bernadette Wilson, Dave Bronson, or Taylor.

Their assumption is that if Bishop disappears from the governor’s contest, at least some of his vote will migrate to Kreiss-Tomkins/T-Beg.

There are also business insiders who backed Bishop and would like to steer him toward a Kreiss-Tomkins ticket. That would help Democrats portray their ticket as bipartisan and provide a permission structure for business Republicans and independents to support it.

But Kreiss-Tomkins now has the Alaska AFL-CIO endorsement. Would Bishop’s business supporters accept a ticket beholden to the state’s largest labor federation? Would T-Beg agree to step aside when he finished second and therefore holds substantial bargaining power?

Every decision changes the next decision.

And hovering over all of it is APOC’s extraordinary intervention in Taylor’s candidacy.

There is an important legal distinction here. APOC staff does not have the power to remove Taylor from the ballot by itself. Under 2 AAC 50.850, staff prepares a list of candidates who have not filed complete disclosures. The commission may then decide whether a candidate substantially complied and recommend that the lieutenant governor refuse certification.

The actual ballot decision belongs to the state’s election authorities, not APOC staff.

It is perhaps too broad to say that an incomplete candidate disclosure can result only in a fine. Alaska law provides a ballot-access remedy for refusing or failing to file a required financial disclosure. The unresolved question is whether Taylor filed enough information by the deadline to have “substantially complied,” or whether an incomplete portion of a timely filing amounts to a failure to file.

That is a serious legal question, especially when the proposed punishment is disenfranchisement rather than a civil penalty.

Taylor did file a disclosure by the deadline. He disclosed the existence and amount of the rental income. The dispute concerns whether he adequately identified his tenants as the sources of that income and whether later attempts to amend the filing cured the defect.

APOC staff acknowledged that the agency has not, in recent memory, assembled a comparable list of candidates with incomplete disclosures under the regulation now being used. Staff wrote that it was unclear whether this is the first time candidates have submitted obvious deficiencies or simply the first time such deficiencies have received public scrutiny.

That admission makes it all a bit squirrelly.

Why is the most severe possible interpretation of the regulations emerging right now, four days before certification, against the candidate whose removal could reshuffle the governor’s race?

Is APOC compromised? The APOC commissioners should be required to explain the agency’s past enforcement practices, identify comparable cases and show whether other candidates’ disclosures were reviewed under the same standard. If incomplete disclosures have traditionally resulted in deficiency notices, amendments and fines, imposing ballot disqualification in this case would raise obvious equal-protection and due-process concerns.

Taylor may have grounds to sue if he is treated differently from similarly situated candidates or if the state attempts to disqualify him without adequate notice and a meaningful opportunity to respond. A retaliation claim would require evidence of retaliatory motive, but selective enforcement alone could become a central issue in emergency litigation. All this, with certification of the election coming on Monday.

The situation is made even more delicate because the Division of Elections and Department of Law must help navigate it. Many state attorneys and officials involved in the process served in state government under Taylor, when he was attorney general. Attorneys stick together. They must now make decisions affecting their former boss, under intense political pressure and against a ballot-printing deadline.

They need to proceed transparently and strictly according to law.

Alaskans should not have to study administrative regulations, Supreme Court opinions, candidate-withdrawal deadlines and the ambitions of fifth- and sixth-place finishers simply to determine who will appear on the ballot.

Yet that is where ranked-choice voting has brought us.

The primary was supposed to narrow the field. Instead, it opened a new round of bargaining in which losing candidates, government regulators, union leaders and political insiders may have more influence over the final ballot than the voters who cast their ballots on Aug. 18.

One withdrawal moves Taylor. One disqualification moves Bishop. One Democratic merger opens another position. One lieutenant governor deal changes the leverage of everyone still standing.

This is not a clean election system. It is political roulette , and Alaskans will not know where the ball lands until the insiders have finished spinning the wheel.

Suzanne Downing is the founder and editor of The Alaska Story and is a longtime Alaskan.

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