Shawn Griffiths
Photo by Richard Martin on Flickr
The Alaska election results have officially been certified and despite calls from Measure 2 supporters for a recount of the ballot initiative's loss by 664 votes, the Alaska Division of Elections re-checked its work before certification and had some bad news for them.
The results show Measure 2 still failed and by an even greater margin.
In my previous coverage I wrote that the nonpartisan better elections group FairVote looked at thousands of statewide elections from 2000 to 2023 and found that only "36 races had a complete statewide recount" -- 3 of which resulted in a change in outcome.
"In fact, FairVote found that the odds are much greater that a recount will result in a widened margin of victory for the winning side," I added.
And lo and behold, this is exactly what happened -- though what the elections division did was not technically a recount. It was a review of the initial count ahead of certification. They did this for all elections.
The official count found that the margin between "No" on Measure 2 and "Yes" wasn't 664 votes -- it was 737.
Measure 2 would have repealed Alaska's nonpartisan top four primary system and its use of ranked choice voting in the general election, even though the election model had only been used once when the Measure 2 campaign was announced.
The difference between "No" and "Yes" in the election shows that -- at least for the voters who participated in 2020 when reform was initially approved and 2024 -- the needle hasn't moved much on support for or opposition to reform.
Advocates of repeal point to millions of dollars poured into the state to help defeat Measure 2, but they also almost benefited from a drop in turnout compared to 4 years ago.