Alaska asks 3,500 voters to confirm citizenship weeks before the primary

The Alaska Division of Elections has moved roughly 3,500 registered voters to inactive status and sent them letters asking them to confirm their U.S. citizenship, less than four weeks before the August 18 primary. The voters did nothing to trigger the change, and the burden of undoing it falls on them.

The names came from a cross-check against Division of Motor Vehicles records. Director Carol Beecher said the batch was far outside the norm — the division usually receives about 200 names — and that she believes the match picked up a good deal of old data. The division has not said how many of the 3,500 it believes were flagged in error, or how it arrived at that assessment.

Beecher said the fix is not burdensome: voters need only call or email to be restored, with no documentation required, and anyone who does not resolve it before election day can still cast a questioned ballot. Questioned ballots are counted separately and reviewed after the election rather than cast normally at the polls.

Whether voters can act in time is a live question. Legislators at a hearing Wednesday cited a constituent who received a letter dated June 16 on July 18, a month later and weeks into the run-up to the primary. Beecher said she would look into the discrepancy. The division has not released mailing records showing when the batch went out.

The flags trace to a registration system unique to Alaska. Under Ballot Measure 1, approved in 2016, applying for a Permanent Fund dividend registers an applicant to vote unless they opt out within 30 days. The two programs run on different standards — PFD eligibility turns on residency, while voting requires U.S. citizenship — and the division's own website answers the question of why a person who is not a citizen might receive a voter registration card. Where critics of the rolls see a real gap, voting-rights advocates note that DMV citizenship data reflects an applicant's status the day a license was issued, meaning permanent residents who have since naturalized can still read as noncitizens years later.

Similar screening is underway nationally through a separate channel. A March executive order opened the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE system to states for checking voter rolls, and the Justice Department has warned election officials of possible prosecution over noncitizen voting. Officials in several states have reported citizens incorrectly flagged, and a federal judge has suspended some expanded features pending appeal. Beecher said Alaska's list came from DMV, not the Justice Department, and that the division is not part of SAVE.

Rep. Clayton Holland pressed on what the process assumes. "How should we think about this question of whether someone is presumed to be a valid voter or presumed to be an invalid voter?" he said.

Beecher said the division had no discretion. "If we get information from a verified source and DMV collects information on citizenship, then the division must act on that," she said.

The division has not said whether moving flagged voters to inactive status before verifying the matches was required by law or chosen as a matter of practice.